


Into the Night Uncharted

by frozenfountain



Series: A Promised Land, Perhaps [2]
Category: Final Fantasy VII (Video Game 1997)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Background Relationships, Character Study, Friendship, Gay Poly Forest Communism, Grief/Mourning, Healing, Introspection, M/M, Multi, Post-Canon, Psychological Drama, Redemption, Revolution, Romance, Solarpunk, Trauma
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-14
Updated: 2021-02-28
Packaged: 2021-03-14 22:29:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 27,206
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29426028
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/frozenfountain/pseuds/frozenfountain
Summary: They're none of them where they thought they'd be, where they wanted to be, for better or worse.  Two years after Meteorfall, Vincent travels a world changing faster than its inhabitants can keep up with in search of absolution.  He intends to do it alone in preparation for leaving humanity behind - but humanity has other ideas.  In a lifetime cursed to span more years than anyone could imagine, it's no less remarkable how much can change in a single one.
Relationships: Reeve Tuesti/Vincent Valentine, Vincent Valentine & Everyone
Series: A Promised Land, Perhaps [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2125059
Comments: 4
Kudos: 8





	1. A Varicoloured Harvest

**Author's Note:**

> This story is primarily a Vincent character study taking place in the aftermath of the original game, being functionally incompatible with and mostly ignoring compilation material, aside from a few details and Easter eggs. It's part of a wider ongoing series imagining the characters building a proto-anarchist society across their world in the wake of Meteor, but can be read as a standalone piece. Revisiting this wonderful world around the release of Remake got me thinking about the ways Yuffie and especially Vincent's roles could be expanded upon, about all the thematic potential in a story about life for a character who can never die. And then those ideas wouldn't leave me alone, so here follows my attempt to do justice to them.  
> The whole piece hinges on exploration of trauma, depression, bereavement, and the variety of ways these characters try to come to terms with being some way off where they wanted or expected to be in life. I don't think there's anything too gnarly here but it does contain non-graphic references to past suicide attempts and medical torture, moderate violence, and canon-typical body horror. Our POV character experiences feelings of shame around eating food and begins the story depriving himself of it as form of self-punishment, and later chapters briefly touch on alcohol abuse. Chapter one involves vomiting, chapter four features a conversation about Yuffie and Elena (who doesn't have a canon age but a timeline deep dive suggests she's younger than you might think, and I place her as seventeen during the original game's timeline) being sexually threatened by Don Corneo, while five discusses among other things Cid's abusive behaviour towards Shera, aiming to take the latter two a bit more seriously than canon did. We earn our rating towards the end, and everything bar two scenes is entirely non-pornographic. If existential probings about mortality and impermanence are likely to set off a nerve for you, I suggest you skip this one for now.  
> I delve into some invented backstory for and arguably alternative interpretation of characters and dynamics, so if that's not your thing, do take note. I have a first draft written in full, presently sitting a little shy of 100K, and aim to update at least once every two weeks.  
> A brief shoutout to _Revolutionary Girl Utena_ , which I watched for the first time back in July while outlining this and was delighted to find not only my singular favourite work of fiction, but a coffin metaphor almost identical to the one employed here. It's fine. It's an homage now. A bigger shoutout to Maria for beta reading, for being a great idea sounding board, for financially enabling me to replay the game and kickstarting all this to begin with (seven years ago in the April of 2020), and most of all: for believing in me for as long as it took me to come out of my own coffin.  
> Lastly, a shoutout to you, dear reader, for giving this behemoth a chance – I hope you enjoy!

" _It seemed as if the morning were stabilized, the sun stopped for an incalculable moment. In this light and this silence, years of wrath and night melted slowly away. I listened to an almost forgotten sound within myself as if my heart, long stopped, were calmly beginning to beat again. And awake now, I recognized one by one the imperceptible sounds of which the silence was made up..._ "

\- Albert Camus, [_Return to Tipasa_](https://genius.com/Albert-camus-return-to-tipasa-annotated)

Vincent was seventeen and hopeful the last time he watched harvest season drawing in, twelve or forty-two years ago. The fields lay deserted before him, boundless prairies fading into a low mist as he strode the perimeter with a line of fading fire red on the horizon. Empty, at least, of those who lived and worked there under the stately bevel of the mountain. _There were walls here, once_ , the scene whispered. Dry furrows in the ground, traces still of a time when fences and hedgerows kept their crops divided and regimented; now different roots and leaves twisted and rose together, helping each other grow. The dust of the day's work remained, life's endless metabolism at play in the wilting stalks, in the dance of gold and vermillion leaves that drifted by Vincent's head as he neared the edge of the forest.

“You are now entering FREE JUNON”, the sign proclaimed, white capitals hastily spray-painted onto a sheet of metal pulled from the side of a fallen Gelnika. Two years had leant it a fine dusting of rust, and the forest had swallowed the welded and bolted edges of the metal, but the proclamation rang out clear. The idea of a boundary, really; guarded by keen eyes and quick fingers hidden in the treetops, but off-limits to no-one. Not even him.

More dead weight fell from the canopy, throwing watery patterns across the forest floor and rustling like gossip. The sentries in the branches made no such sound. Vincent gave a nod to the wooden platforms he'd helped to place and carried on unimpeded. Unsurprising. He was nothing if not distinctive, and indeed, most of the world already seemed to recognise the host of darkness, the freak experiment, the terrifying unkillable sniper of Avalanche come to rain a crimson terror over all who stood in opposition to liberty and self-determination – but to this place, still nestled in the golden fog of the farm, he brought nothing more than a bottle of Kalm red.

The flowers burst forth from fern and bracken in fiery sunset hues, violets and auburns, picking out the edges of the trail and shying away from the sweeping movement of his cloak as he went. High birdsong turned shrill and ended in a flurry of feathers as three red-faced boys came bursting through the brush, jostling one another on skinny legs in shorts. Their laughter ceased when their eyes fell upon him, the tall black-clad anomaly too pale for the last light of the sun to colour. Vincent inclined his head again and moved on, but they stayed frozen for a moment in his wake, and went on their way with a new hesitance. As the trees grew closer and the wind from the mountain heights came down colder, coloured lanterns strung from branches showed him the way, chatter and woodsmoke winding through the woods from a place with many names. Free Junon most broadly, “Autonomous” and “Municipal” often specified in publication, and simply “the village” to those lucky enough to live nestled among the cedars and oaks and pines.

The first houses emerged from the autumn haze, built on stilts at head height. “ _The runoff from the mountain can cause flooding in the colder months_ ,” Reeve wrote in one of his first letters, throwing in a few copies of the new designs. He'd heard Reeve's voice as he read it the first time and it came again now, carried on the same wind that caressed the leaves. “ _I asked everyone planning to live there what kind of place they'd like, showed them the Cetra architecture, and you're going to be amazed at how creative this group of people is_.” Their homes had been piles of freshly cut logs the last time Vincent was there, and one by one he passed the blueprints come to life. The turret built around the tall elm he'd sent with the letter, the glass box reflecting the stream and the triangle with the wide veranda Reeve had drawn before him at their coffee table in Mideel, frowning and squinting as he went, but always with a playful smile on his lips.

All the houses were empty, windows lightless and no smoke pluming from the chimneys. Here, with late autumn sap on the air and no sound but for the woods, the bloodshed that brought them there could be a story and nothing more. Vincent paused. A twig broke under his armoured boots, and his tattered cloak caught on a tangle of shrubbery. He swept it back behind him, and without warning, his foot caught one of the purple flowers and crushed it. The wind stirred again, and laughter he wasn't privy to echoed through the trees. He should start back across the fields and into darkness as it crept over the hills. He'd come to this place of peace and light with the sting of cordite and an air of dried viscera about him, they never washed away, and even the wind seemed to sneer it –

_You don't belong here_.

He should've stayed in Corel. They'd asked him to, after the last of the Seawall peacekeepers turned tail and left the town to spray the word “FREE” in red letters on the side of an old barn for all the world to see. As they rolled out long tables and kegs of aged ale, Tifa's invitation had seemed the better, quieter one. Vincent sighed. He'd stood beside these people to fight the very end of the world. He could give them the one night they offered.

The community centre in the middle of the clearing loomed into view, and Vincent jolted to a stop again. He pressed himself behind a tall oak just out of sight. Reeve's design had come to life straight from the page – two wings extending from a square building elevated ten feet off the ground, yellow wood with solar panel roofs in swirling blues and greens, wide windows opening onto wooden balconies alive with flowers and vines. But between him and the door was the whole village, smiling sunburned people in brightly coloured clothing gathered around the fire pit below the centre, running to and fro between tall cauldrons and trestle tables laden with bottles. His single offering of wine, meant to share with eight other people, was lighter in his hands. Barret's booming voice cut through the static of their talk – there he was at the grill, turning skewers one-handed in his pink and yellow shirt, hair grown out over two years and brushing the surface of his sunglasses in buoyant coils. And yes, Cloud and Tifa stood a ways to his left, in near-identical denim cutoffs, midriff-baring shirts of flower-coloured tie dye.

It made sense, really. Thus was the way they did things in this new world. No walls, no borders, no members only club of their own. The rest of the village had as much right, no, more right than him to be there. They lived there, worked there, built it from nothing. When Vincent opened the invitation and learned of the reunion party, they'd all been wearing the same battle clothes and body armour they had on their travels together. They smiled in the fading light, glowing gold, oh, how _young_ they all were, to have lived through so much loss so soon. Vincent placed his spare hand on the rough bark of the tree. Small wonder, perhaps, that they'd cling so much to the man who'd always be there, whether he liked it or not. He shook his head. The wind came again and tugged at his cloak, pulling it back towards the edge of the forest and the wild beyond, back to where he belonged. Coming so far was another mistake. He rocked back on his heels, the outside calling him, but the treacherous breeze turned and carried his presence over to the fire. Nanaki stirred and reared up on his hind legs, tail waving, and found him.

Sighing, Vincent advanced, stopping by the gate with a small wave. “Am I alright to come in?”

“Vincent! Of course!” Tifa caught sight of him and bounded over from her work station, grinning as she unlatched the gate. “Thanks!” she said, taking the bottle from his hand and pulling him to her. He returned the embrace with one arm, and she swayed a little on her feet as she drew back, leading him by the elbow towards the centre. “It's changed quite a bit since the last time we saw you here, huh?”

He nodded, stepping slow and heavy across the patio. Those present gathered on wooden benches in an area framed by long boxes overflowing with herbs, fragrant in the sun. A shriek from somewhere to the east pierced through the susurrus talk, where a whirl of dashing pink that heralded Marlene Wallace flung herself down a spiraling slide in a fenced off playground. Apparatus for running and climbing, all made in a style that curved and swirled like the patterns made by spells, designs that could only belong to Reeve.

Cloud glanced up from chopping vegetables with the kind of open smile the man he first met would never have allowed himself. “You don't need to ask to come in, man.”

A few of the new faces shot him nervous smiles or a hushed “Hey, Valentine” or “Welcome to the village” or “Nice night for a visit.” Not Barret, who clapped him on the shoulder the moment he approached the grill. “You still askin' permission to come on in? You don't do yourself one single favour where some of those rumours about you are concerned.” He flipped a row of steaks on the grill with a wheezing hiss. “Once the grub's up you oughtta eat some garlic just to prove 'em wrong. Can I get you somethin' to drink?”

Vincent shook his head, shoulders hunched. “No, thank you.” Food or drink would be an unnecessary indulgence for his invulnerable body... but the _smell_. Sometimes in the seconds before a long sleep his past life would resurface and some frail and undisciplined part of himself would picture it, throwing back a cold beer with Barret and Cid or taking a glass of rich wine with dinner, and it was _there_ on his tongue... But food was for the living, and the things under his skin – _hypothesised that transformations can be triggered by adrenal rush and fluctuation_ , in that reedy rasping voice again with the needle in his hand and something _alive_ and swimming in the violet liquid while he was bound, paralysed, the metal biting cold against his back.

_You can't scream. You can't give them anything._ Eide had whispered it in his ear, high-pitched and close to breaking, the two of them in their regulation suits cuffed to a radiator back-to-back in some tumbledown warehouse in the slums of Sector Three. Anti-mako activist cell who knew enough to lure two Turks into the labyrinth of the undercity they knew so well and take them in. Quite the welcoming spread laid out before them, knives and pliers and blowtorches, while their captors muttered in the other room beyond hearing. And Eide shaking beside him, _they taught us how to focus on our breathing, so I'll tell you now, it's like_ -

He snapped his own wrist to free himself from the cuffs and get them both back on their feet. The pain, the fear, the struggle to fight one-handed and without a gun, none of it mattered next to the safety of the man by his side. He survived for another day, but in truth, his destiny always lay on the end of a knife. Eide hugged him the day he left for Nibelheim, thanked him for saving them in a way the rugged fight afterwards hadn't allowed for. _To think we first met with you complaining about the quality of the coffee... Had you down as another pampered rich kid from the office, couldn't work out what they put you with us for, but you're alright, man. Gonna miss your scrawny ass_. Hojo had cut away that part of him, too, left it to die outside the coffin – until...

“Vincent?” said Tifa, swaying before him again. “All good?”

The lights came on again and there he was in the clearing, Tifa peering at him on unsteady feet with a glass of something pink and deadly-looking in her hand, a glass and not a syringe, and still the birds were singing. “Yes,” he said after a beat, loosening the knot in his chest. “Are you?”

She giggled. “I _may_ have gotten a little over-excited while I was testing cocktail recipes for tonight, and I may have also forgotten to eat lunch.”

“Then sit down.” Cloud appeared at her side, placing a hand on the small of her back. The rest of what he said was whispered in her ear, lost under the talk of the village and the deeper, darker sounds his racing heartbeat summoned. The beast called for blood, not in words, it didn't know words, but with a thirst that stole up his throat and something like an itch, there was danger, and danger could only be doused one way.

Tifa shook her head and drew away. “Can't. There's so much left to do.”

“Let me help,” said Vincent. Hojo's laughter still echoed in his ear, next to the rumblings of the beast, and his hands shook. He needed something to put in them. Most of everyone else was chopping, stirring, mixing salads in large bowls or opening bottles. Only he was stood still in the centre of the blur.

Tifa nodded and directed him in front of one of the cauldrons, simmering with a golden yellow liquid. “I need this to be stirred constantly while I add flour,” she said. “You won't get too bored?”

The liquid bubbled, rich and slightly sweet. Coconut, ginger, and something sour. Vincent took hold of the long spoon. “I think I can manage that much without disaster.”

“Can't be worse than Cloud,” said the freckled, red-headed woman beside him.

Cloud laughed and threw the root end of a carrot in her direction. “That was one time.”

“Dunno what we're complainin' for,” said Barret, leaning back from the grill with a beer in hand and paper plates of charred meat ready beside him. “Way I remember it there was still enough stew left for all of us after we put the fire out. Didn't even taste too bad.”

They earned a laugh from Tifa, adding flour pinch by pinch to the cauldron. “You're doing great, just keep it moving so it won't burn or clump.” And then she was off with the last of the flour gone, trotting to and fro between her friends until sweat beaded on her brow and the first of the cicadas struck up a chorus somewhere in the trees.

The people of the village drifted past in loose, pale summer clothes, flowing skirts and oversized T-shirts on weatherbeaten skin. Vincent sank his chin deeper into his cowl as more of them came out from the thickets and the coloured lights, bringing an insect buzz of chatter with them. Children skipped around their feet under the open sky, waving calloused hands with easy smiles on their faces, a few of them blinking and staring at him. He made a fine sight, no doubt, stirring food in the tattered red cape that signalled doom upon the last bastions of the old world.

A drop of the stew splashed onto his hand, stinging for but a moment. _No skin burns this time_ , she'd noted, in the slow drawl she used while taking notes. He was already on his feet, ready to rush to her side, but she didn't need him. She brushed the fizzing green liquid onto the back of her lab coat and smirked. _I must be on the right track_. A short walk across the tile floor with the click of her heels like punctuation. _That does tend to be a positive sign_ , he'd said, barely holding back a nervous laugh. Then as now, he had nothing else to say, watching her command her domain from his desk in the corner, her eyes in a book or on the lens of a microscope, rarely finding their way across to him.

_You promised you wouldn't do this tonight. You promised yourself you'd stay with them_. And there he was, stirring spiced stew in the last warmth of the summer with birdsong on the air, while she kept herself in the damp and cold, never to see the life of the world she'd been so driven by again.

Tifa returned, throwing red and green powders into the cauldron and standing back, her hands on her hips and a distant smile on her face. “This is so surreal, watching you with all of us, still in your get-up. I'm so glad you came.”

Had she doubted it? They had when he came back to the deck of their ship – _it's just that you're always so cold –_ and they were right to. Crouched before her in the cave the night before they entered the yawning black gateway to the demigod under the ground, he could've stayed there forever, the last few hours of forever before the fiery doom his mistakes had created struck. And when it hit, perhaps it would shatter the crystal and let him take her in his arms, together in the prison they made for themselves as the world tore at the seams, the last chance to end his suffering and hers. To spare them both an eternity of lonely darkness would only cost the world.

But he stood, he walked back into the light, and he would be there still when the forest and the village fell into the sea, washing up somewhere else while he stood alone on a shore none of them could name. _I'll shoulder both of our sins_ , he promised, for as long as it took the planet to swallow itself back into the cosmos.

He blinked. “More people than I expected,” he said.

“Yeah.” She turned her head to look at them all, smiling. “I know we said it was going to be the big Avalanche reunion, but when I stepped back and thought about it, it doesn't seem right, does it? Cutting ourselves off, trying to make a special exclusive club just for us. And the centre was up and running sooner than we thought so I figured, why not merge it with the grand opening?”

He nodded and said no more. Tifa left to help with the assembly behind him, and the noise went on in layers, too many. Barret didn't seem to mind. He held down the fort at the grill, beer in hand, giving a nod to everyone who passed with a friendly “Hi, Barret”. A long way from the angry man he'd journeyed with, and even the fractured voice who found him on the phone a month ago, begging him to help the town he felt he couldn't. As a twice-broken people found their hope again pelting the ruins of a mako reactor with rocks, Barret's absence stood out like the jutting, jagged peaks above them, and Vincent still hadn't told him about it. It wasn't a conversation for the phone, or for a crowded gathering like this.

“Heard you're off into the wild again soon, Barret,” said a newcomer, a man in khaki shorts, late fifties perhaps, taking a break from chopping the spray of fresh herbs on the table before him. “Where's it gonna be this time?”

“Come winter I'll be headin' up to the north with Elmyra – you know her, right? She's workin' at the centre in Junon but she comes through to see Marlene and me every week?”

Nanaki sauntered over, tail swishing to and fro and head held proud. He rose up onto his hind legs and placed his front paws on the lip of the cauldron, sniffing the air. “I think this one could use some green Gongaga chillies.”

Barret snorted. “People who don't got opposable thumbs can't be backseat cooks, Red. And besides, like hell would I put anythin' that grew in that poisoned air in my mouth.”

“I'll cut some of our chillies, though, just in case people want more heat,” said Tifa, stumbling past with two crates full of ripe oranges and a breathless edge to her voice.

Cloud emerged from behind one of the long tables, winding an arm around her waist and steadying the boxes as she fell back against him. “You haven't stopped all day,” he said, kissing her temple. “Why don't you give yourself five minutes?”

“We can do it, Cloud!” A woman to Vincent's right stood to attention, grinning with a chef's knife. “How about I race you?”

Cloud sauntered over to the table and took up a knife of his own. “You're on!”

A hammering began, and as two piles of diced green grew on the table, Vincent's lips quirked upward behind his cowl. Her green eyes narrowed, she put up a fair fight against Cloud and his mako-gifted speed. Barret watched them with a grin, holding up his new hand in front of him. “Makes you wanna get in on that. I'll have to get me one of these with some kitchen implements to fit on, knives, whisks, a blender, you name it.”

“I'm sure Reeve would try it if you asked him.” Tifa was slicing oranges across the way, and smiled more widely when she looked up. “Speak of the devil!”

Vincent turned, fast enough that his hair whirled behind him, following Tifa's eye to the path leading up through the forest. Reeve strolled beside Elmyra Gainsborough in a short-sleeved shirt the exact shade of blue that had haunted Vincent's dreams since the rescue, both of them carrying wicker baskets of fresh bread and dark wine. The tired, melancholy woman who stepped off the Highwind in Junon at the infancy of its freedom was gone; now she laughed with her hair down and a wide skirt fluttering around her knees, white chiffon printed with all the colours of the flowers she grew. They emerged from the low-lying haze into the dappled sunlight of the clearing, and Reeve looked at her like she was the moon rising on a lonely night.

“Marlene!” Barret called, his hands both skin and metal cupped around his mouth. “Your Aunt Elmyra's here with Reeve!”

Reeve waved with the arm not bearing gifts. “Sorry we're late! It's been a long day.”

“We've been looking at some new Midgar mushroom samples,” said Elmyra, dropping her basket onto one of the tables. “I feel like we're _so_ close to determining what it is that makes them glow like that.” She extended a hand to Vincent with a small smile, but in a moment rapid footsteps and a blur of pink launched upon her and she stumbled backwards. She righted herself and laughed, ruffling the girl's hair. “I missed you too, Marlene.”

“Hey.” Reeve appeared at Vincent's side, smiling with his hair brushed out of its usual slick, wavy and free around his face, but the crowd got to him before Vincent could return the sentiment. Tifa was one, winding her arms around his neck before moving on to Elmyra.

“I'm so glad I could catch you before you two head north,” she said as they embraced.

“Likewise.” Elmyra pulled back and smoothed her skirt. “I hope this doesn't sound too weird, but you smell incredible.”

“Why, thank you.” Tifa ran her fingers through one forelock and brushed it back behind her ear. “It's this shampoo I've been using. It was the weirdest thing. After we liberated Junon we took stock of everything in the city, and we found whole crates of this stuff in the barracks under the command tower. We never found out what kind of military application it could have, but,” and she paused, throwing her dark mane back and forth, “look how soft and shiny my hair is now! I'll give you a bottle to take home. Oh, Vincent, that one's probably done now, if you want to come and sit with us!”

He stepped away from the cauldron and made his way to the fire pit, the pointed tips of his shoes cracking dry matter on the ground. Everyone seemed to be grouped together already, assembling the last of the salads at long tables and talking about village goings-on, or catching up with friends from afar by the fire. On a tree stump a short way back from the gathering sat Elena of the Turks, swishing red wine in a tall glass. She stared into the ground, frilly white blouse sporting a stain from the orange slicing, the only soul as out of place as Vincent. She took a sip of her drink as Reeve sat on the ground beside her, throwing Vincent a smile where he stood, half-there.

“Hello, Elena,” he said, warm and welcoming. “It's been a while since I caught you.”

“Hello, Director Tuesti,” she mumbled, putting down her glass and clasping her hands on her knees.

Reeve shook his head. “Oh, there's no need for that, you can call me by my name. I haven't directed anything in a while now.”

She nodded. “Okay,” she said, and nodded some more, lips sealed.

“How's life in the village treating you?” said Reeve, undeterred. “I trust the house is to your liking?”

“Oh, yeah, the house is great, thank you. Independent woman now, living on my own. So, um, it's fine.” She picked up her glass again, circling a thumb around its rim, nails chewed to pink stubs on the hand that knocked down Cloud in one punch. The defiant jut of her chin was gone, the ramrod line of her back that added inches to her small stature, all of it was gone the way as her verbosity.

“I was so glad to hear your family turned up safe in the end.”

“Thanks, yeah, they're fine.” She looked off to the side with a wince no-one untrained would catch. “They've come to visit a couple of times. They're living in Kalm.”

“You're still working at the school? I'm sorry, for someone who lives here I don't have a lot of time to keep up with who's doing what and where.”

She nodded. “I am, and it's good, yeah, it's going well. It's not like the schools I went to, I don't grade the kids or anything, but it's... nice.”

“It sounds that way. Sharing knowledge is a good line of work, I think.”

A third voice joined them with all the grace and subtlety of a foghorn. “Nerd alert.”

Vincent allowed himself a small smile where no-one could see it. “Hello, Yuffie.”

“Vince,” she said, clapping his shoulder on her way past with a green bottle in her hand. “Still a loser, I see. Now, I want you all to listen up!” She held the bottle aloft for the few who paid attention. “This is my very first beer. Now, I think it tastes like shit, personally, but I want all of you to know you have the privilege of watching me down as many of these things as I can and still come out faster and stronger and better than anyone else here.” She paused and belched with gusto, then turned her attention to the tree stump. “Now move up, Turk.”

Reeve scrambled to his feet as she sat and stood beside Vincent, close enough to catch the movement of his exhalation as he whispered “Oh, dear”.

“I gotta say,” said Yuffie, bruised shins sticking out of her cargo shorts as she planted her feet far apart on the ground, “this is working out a lot better for you guys than I thought. At first I gave this whole self-governance thing six months tops before you all started hating each other or someone came along and took it apart, so I'm impressed.” She took another swig of her beer, grimacing. “But I'm still gonna come back some day and conquer it.”

“I'm counting on it. Been getting way too quiet around here,” Cloud said, deadpan and pointing to a tall elm. “You see the trapdoor under that tree? We got a whole room of swords and firepower and mastered materia ready and waiting for you.”

“I look forward to it,” she said, raising her bottle.

“And it's also where I store the pickles,” said Tifa, slapping her forehead. “I'd better go and -”

“Hey, Tifa, I can do it.” A blonde woman rose from one of the benches, ruffling her son's hair as she stood. “You got more than enough on your plate.”

“Thank you, Dani – two or three big jars ought to do it?” She resumed her place beside Cloud and wiped the sweat from her brow, smiling smugly at Yuffie. “You see? People don't need incentive to help each other.”

Yuffie scoffed, and only for a second Cloud and Tifa shared a conspiratorial look. She smiled then, walking over with her hands clasped behind her back, the way she always did when she was after something.

“Could I ask a favour of you both? I was so sure I had enough tomatoes growing here for all the salads, but it looks like I miscalculated. Would you be so good as to head over to Runa's place and pick up a couple boxes? You know where it is, right, Reeve?”

Reeve stood up straighter and nodded. “Sure thing. Is there anything else you need?”

She shook her head and he set off along a trail into the pine grove. Vincent followed with a nod where long shadows cast a net across the path, falling into step beside Reeve, pace slow and languid. “It's a nice excuse to get a moment's peace,” he said as they turned a corner away from the village, breathing deep in the earthy air as the talk receded into the trill of a collared dove and the snap of twigs and leaves beneath their feet. Reeve smiled and kicked lightly in his shining brown shoes at the dead leaves around his ankles. “Not that I don't enjoy seeing everybody come together, but they do get a little loud. ”

Vincent turned his head to the greying sky, dark enough that the coloured lanterns threw haloes on the tips of the branches. “And last time I came, it was all blueprints. It's remarkable what can change in a year.” He paused. “I hope you're all proud.”

The words came out robotic, rehearsed, but Reeve smiled anyway, a crooked smile accompanied by a downward glance as they walked. The setting sun caught on his eyelashes and the thick hair that swept about his forehead, the warmth of his brown eyes glowed with it. In the fading light, with no red tie and the top buttons of his shirt left open to the warm evening air, he looked ten years younger than he did on the rooftop in Junon. Boyish, almost, even with the dark circles under his eyes.

He turned to Vincent with a small frown. “And you're feeling alright? With all those people there?”

Vincent blinked. “They all seem... very kind. And as Tifa said, they have as much right to be there as anyone. They live here, contribute. I'm just stopping by.”

His husk of a voice descended on the whispering woods and meandering stream like the crack of thunder, like the clash of tectonic plates, a harsh unwanted intrusion on the tranquil evening. It was a voice that had no business being there. He shuddered. He'd never had a way with spoken words, but he'd intoned them elegantly once in another life, another world, before the hours of screams in the basement tore the softness from him.

Reeve's voice was deep but smooth, a rolling velvet as gentle as his words. “That isn't what I asked.” He pursed his lips for a fraction of a moment before he put his smile back on. “But, hey! I wanted to catch you alone at some point tonight.” He reached into his pocket. “I'd better show you these before we're too busy carrying boxes.”

Aerial photographs of scaffolding and cranes in the mountain town, and closer shots of the people of Corel gathered in the square, sharing food in lukewarm sunlight. “The money from the toll placed on the ropeway paid for most of the materials needed for the reconstruction, and they're running on coal reserves until the wind farm is completed.” Reeve led him over an arching wooden bridge, across the singing stream, shuffling through to the last of the pictures. A row of long missile cannons jutted from the mountainside like spindly arms. “The people of Corel know the mountain passes better than anyone, and we sent them anti-aircraft weaponry to take care of the skies. Now it's only the way up from the foothills they have to worry about.”

They proceeded through the trees, smaller elms and birches shying away from the great oaks and evergreens that overshadowed the next cluster of homes. Reeve passed him the photos and a written report, half-obscured by the neck of his cowl. Wooden frames in the shape of long, low dwellings rose beside two completed structures of stone and slate roof. Houses, real homes, and not the tumbledown shacks of spare parts and scrap the people had shuffled out of the day Vincent arrived to help them take back their home.

“I was going to put these in my next letter to you, but since you pick them up here, I figured I might as well just show you in person.” Reeve stopped then and turned to him, placing a hand on his shoulder. “You did a wonderful thing for those people, Vincent.”

Corel was a proud town once, its people made strong by their labour under the earth and united in their purpose of bringing power to the world. He'd shivered to hear Barret tell the tale of what it had been reduced to, and grown cold again when he saw for himself, stepping off the train that stopped seconds before destroying the semblance of a community they had left.

“It was them, not me. All I did was show up. Those people love their town, know it better than anyone else. And they don't love it less when it needs some work.”

Reeve nodded, parted his lips, then straightened up and said nothing. He lifted the hand on Vincent's shoulder and moved along, not without a final sweep of his eyes over the rest of him.

“Even so,” he said. “I can tell it means a lot to them that you showed up and proved someone was in their corner.”

Vincent walked in step beside him, the pressure of Reeve's fingers lingering on his shoulder, though no warmth could make it through the tight leather. “Barret should know all of this.”

“I know.” Reeve turned his face to the left and walked on. “I just thought he might prefer to hear it from you. You were there.”

Vincent tucked the photos into the pocket where he kept the rest of the letters. “I can try to pass them on before he leaves for Icicle Inn.” Silence swelled but for the rush of the brook and the echo of the dove's song somewhere deeper in the trees. “... How are things in the city?”

“You're in serious danger of getting a monologue about the contrasting properties of all the different fibres we're using for the blade fittings on the next batch of wind turbines.” He tilted his head and smiled fondly. “No, we're fine. Things are happening so fast I forget it's still early days sometimes, that all we're building is still in its most experimental phase. And they're so young, most of the team, fresh out of college. I always hope being at the forefront isn't too much pressure on them.” He slipped into a soft laugh. “Still, Elmyra's going north for a few months, and I have no doubt the place is about to get a lot sillier without her. When she went to Mideel for a week and Priya was assigned the watering of the plants, it took all of two days to degenerate into all-out war. I went home soaked every day. The peace talks won out once we realised we had to clean it up before she got back.”

Vincent laughed, two small exhalations that turned Reeve's head and echoed in the stillness of the forest. It was easy to picture, as easy as Reeve's fond smile when he talked about his team, all of them ducking around corners with stockpiles of watering cans and ducking behind desks with loaded hoses and Reeve in the centre of it, laughing as he brushed forelocks of dripping dark hair out of his eyes and moved with his white shirt soaked and clinging to him. Vincent shook himself and kept step. “The centre is a beautiful place to visit,” he said, only the truth. A joy it was to stop by and walk into that blush of sunlight shining through coloured glass, embraced on arrival by the scent of flowers and the shimmering, upbeat music they piped through the speakers. “I'm sure they're excited to be on the front lines, and they look as though they enjoy being there. You're a good leader, Reeve.”

He shook his head, a mere inch shorter than Vincent but sometimes seeming so much more. “Oh, no, I'm not leading anything. We don't need bosses on our team. I trust them all to do what needs to be done without anyone breathing down their necks.”

“But they look to you for guidance. I can see that, even passing through.”

“Yes, well.” He looked distant for a moment, then nodded towards a single-story building set on stilts, eye level with a young birch. “We're here now.”

The produce was stacked in a tower by the steps up to the door. The scent of tomatoes still on the vine, rich and warm, hung heavy in the air. They grew them in the greenhouse at the bottom of the garden of his childhood home and it would take a second to reach out a hand, the pale one not encased in bulletproof alloy, and take one, let it burst in his mouth and be back there safe within the walls of that greenhouse, one more time. Just for a moment. His hand remained at his side.

Vincent stood back as Reeve lifted a box, then moved in for one of his own. Reeve wore a pink silk ribbon on his right wrist where a watch would usually sit, of the same type wrapped around Vincent's forearm. They'd all caught on, one by one, putting the ribbons on themselves like a badge of honour for having known Aerith, even for a short while. Vincent kept his tight and constricting on his gun arm for different reasons, a brand and not a medal. _What's one more_ , a cold and lifeless voice somewhere inside him said when Aerith slumped to the floor, wilting limply with her blood pooling on the floor. _What's one more_ , and Cloud was crying, and Aerith never would again, never laugh or shout or curse. He stood over her, just one more in an eternity of farewells that stretched ahead of him black as a closed casket, while the others wept and the planet itself howled in anguish, spilling out creatures of its wrath in response. _What's one more_ , and it was true, and it was right, even as she was lowered into the water and his hands shook and an ache bloomed in his chest where only emptiness had been for so very long.

Reeve and the doves shook him back. “You coming?”

Vincent lifted the crate, the rough wood harsh and rasping under his metal claws. The scrape made him shiver, even after so long scratching at walls, catching on railings. The mysterious substance that made up the encasement had stopped bullets and ended in sharp points that had opened countless throats, and still he kept it on his arm for a gathering with his friends. Or had the years let him forget what lay beneath it? The gauntlet had helped him fight for these people and their way of life. The limb beneath it bore the marks of the shadows that had been put into his body, scars black and cracking on the hand that once pulled the trigger for Shinra.

Then again, perhaps it would come in useful. Fetching two crates didn't require two people – no doubt Tifa was afraid for Reeve's safety again. Vincent had been summoned to Corel after three separate incidents of mercenaries in the employ of the Eastern Seawall Power Company assaulting the town on the grounds that the area was unfit for purpose beyond mining, in the same manner of power grab that won them Kalm and most of the coastal western continent. And gathered in the village were several key figures of the resistance, all in one place, drunk and off their guard... But Reeve was hardly a likely target for assassination as he walked beside Vincent, taking the long way back to see the beavers building their new home in the stream, talking in his smooth voice about how to help a barren land in the snow plains.

“I felt cold just watching you all climb the mountains from my office,” he said. “Barret and Elmyra are, once again, much braver than I.”

“The winds came for us, claimed so many lives on those mountains, and now they'll become the source of life for all around.” Poetic, in its own way. The cold made little difference to Vincent, a pricking on his half-alive skin and little more. The winds that howled around the cliff were another matter, threatening at any moment to send the party plummeting onto the jagged outcroppings below. Vincent stuck the claws of his gauntlet into the ice with a growl and climbed, and he didn't care, it didn't make a difference that she was gone.

“I recall the town fondly, though,” he said. Icicle Inn was a beacon, its windows a single point of light on that endless bleak expanse in the dead of winter. They went to their rooms in silence, hoping some of the warmth of the fires would lift the chill that settled on them in that long-forgotten palace of the Cetra. The north was one of the few places his time as a Turk had never taken him, an area with little in the way of resources and mostly left to its own devices. A town he'd never gone to under a false name with a loaded gun and a list of names, only unbroken snow and no half-remembered sin to greet him. He cleared his throat, as though it sealed over again and again to silence him. “The people are glad to help a stranger, but they're tough, resilient. Just the right candidates for what you've been doing.”

Reeve nodded and shifted the box in his arms. “You could visit again. It's almost always dark this time of year, and I think I remember you saying you liked the cold and the snow.” He laughed to himself, wheezy and strained. “Call it a Vincentive.”

Vincent levelled a glare at him over the rim of his collar, hiding a smile. “How long were you saving that one up?”

Reeve snorted and motioned Vincent over the bridge, back along the path to the centre with a swarm of voices drifting through the trees to meet them. He could've asked Reeve to stay with him under the coloured lights, in this ease of quiet, the stillness and encroaching dark that felt like home. And he would've stayed, he would've looked at Vincent tenderly and nothing good could have come of it. So they made their way back to the fireside and everyone gathered there.

They weren't the only arrivals, two others emerging from the leafy shadows at the other side of the clearing. “We got it!” cried Shera, waving a newspaper in the air. She walked without ease on black patent heels through the rough-hewn trails, a few outlying branches snagging on the wide ruffled skirts of her yellow frock. Cid came a step behind her, tugging at the red bow tie around his neck, at odds with his scruff and the stray hair that brushed the back of his collar.

Marlene reached them first, wrapping her arms around Cid's legs in his slacks as Reeve took a seat at the fire. “I've missed you, Uncle Cid!” she said, following him to one of the benches and scrambling up onto his bulky shoulders.

He laughed, a husky sound almost lodged in his throat, with a brightness coming to his weatherbeaten face lined with worry so long before its time. “Missed you too, possum. Now, if you'd be so good as to give me one second to say my hellos and let me show y'all this paper -”

“You're my fourth favourite person now,” she said into his back.

Tifa leaned in to Elmyra, both of them holding glasses of something crimson. “You and I share second place now,” she whispered.

Elmyra gasped and raised a hand to her lips, blinking again and again. She walked up to Shera and took her in her arms, kissed her cheek, and Cloud wasn't far behind. “How are things with the observatory, Cid?”

Cid raised the beer someone had put into his hand with a lopsided grin. “'S'goin' swell. Machine's still tickin' over, all the readouts are tellin' me we're on the right track and the planet approves. Canyon's beautiful, as is my lady, what more can I ask for?”

Marlene tugged on the crisp sleeve of his sky-blue shirt. “Uncle Cid?”

He patted her shining hair and rested his chin on his other hand. “Whaddya wanna know, kid?”

“When you and daddy went off to fight the soldier in the sky, did you really get turned into a frog for the whole time?”

A round of guffaws passed around the fire. Reeve leaned in, close enough to carry the scent of his cologne, smooth and sweet and earthy – sandalwood, Vincent found it at the marketplace in Junon after their two weeks in Mideel and stopped in his tracks. “Truly, the worst part about being in custody was missing _that_ on video,” he whispered, then turned back to the others and raised his voice. “Are we sure we only want to build one statue? I think Cid's amphibious adventures should be commemorated, too.”

Cid narrowed his eyes and jabbed a finger in Reeve's general direction. “And you'll always be a stuffed cat ridin' a goddamn moogle to me, Tuesti, so you can just close your damn mouth. I know you ain't serious.”

“Maybe so,” said Barret, “but I can tell it scares you for at least a second.”

Cid scowled and lit a cigarette. “Whatever. You guys wanna hear about this ultra-secret expose or not?”

The gathering murmured assent as Cid held up the paper, open on a full-page photo of Barret, taken low to the ground so he grew twenty feet tall, pacing the tended paths of his home with a scowl and the gun on his arm. Another one for the pile. Never did they show the world a picture of him lifting beams and girders with a song on his lips, or helping his daughter with her pumpkin patch in soft afternoon sun.

“We sent undercover journalists into the heart of the so-called Free Junon Autonomous Stretch,” said Cloud, leaning over Cid's shoulder to read as he swept by with a platter of ribs bound for the nearest table. “A lawless reach of land under occupation by mako-enhanced radicals.”

Elmyra tossed her hair back and rolled her eyes. “All they had to do was ask us.”

Barret leaned over and grunted. “You're in here, too.”

“Oh?” Cloud gave a small smile. “Am I a warlord again?”

Cid scowled and shuffled the paper upright, taking a deep drag of his smoke. “Cloud Strife, a former mercenary and member of the notorious rebel faction, Avalanche, oversees the unpaid labour demanded of the forest community with one hand on his man-sized sword -”

“I do notice that nobody ever considers _I_ might be a warlord, too,” said Tifa, breezing past with three large bowls of colourful salads and the smell of citrus following her.

“And in the ruins of Midgar,” said Barret, shaking his head, “those who refuse to fall in line with this group's ideology are held captive, forced to perform back-breakin' physical work scrubbin' the area of residual mako – which they wouldn't have to do if they hadn't gone and put it there in the first damn place!”

Elmyra leaned over Barret's shoulder and laughed as she read. “Well, this part's true. We _did_ thoroughly indoctrinate the one-time Director Tuesti into our life of crime, when he'd never gotten so much as a parking ticket before.” A round of cheers went up at that and Reeve reddened only slightly before he raised the wine glass he'd picked up along with the others.

“Guys! _Guys_!” Yuffie staggered into the centre of the circle, a bottle of amber liquid in a different shade to the one she'd had before raised over her head. “I'm trying cider now! You guys, did you guys know... The more you drink, the easier it gets to drink more?” She threw back her head and chugged, wiping her mouth with a satisfied sound. “This is fun!” She stabilised herself enough to peer over Elmyra's shoulder and take a look at the spread. “Holy shit. They even made Vince look cool.”

Cid chuckled and turned the paper around again, open on a double-page photo of broken wooden houses on stilts, measured against blueprints as the green tendrils of the jungle wound their way around the structures. Mideel. In the foreground Vincent held a man in military armour by his throat while he kicked and cried out for salvation the town would never give him, from this tall man with dark hair and cloak billowing behind him. The prospector from Seawall, hoping to follow in the footsteps of Shinra and bind the town still standing by a miracle to their territory. Lifting him was no effort at all, not like holding back the wheezing voice that called out to snap his neck, crush his jaw, bleed what was left of his pulse all over the forest floor. Always hungry, always waiting, cackling inside him when the man choked too much to scream.

Vincent had dropped him, unloaded his pistol, and walked away.

“Frame it,” said Yuffie, making her way back to the edge of the circle. “Hey, Turk, can I try some of your wine next?”

“Oh, dear,” Reeve whispered again, surely to no-one but Vincent. The wine he carried was sweet and dense on the air. The first time Vincent drank more than a single small glass of dark red with dinner was the first week of college, knocking back one shot of clear paint stripper after another to keep pace with the rest of the room who'd been doing it for years, normal kids with friends who spent teenage nights with illicit bottles of cheap booze to fuel carefree laughing memories. He'd hidden in the corner, fighting to keep his insides inside, and never tried again until the night after his first solo mission to Gongaga, changing into a clean suit to meet Eide and Talya at their regular haunt, a dive in Sector Four, Eide pressing a drink and then another into his hand, _it gets easier after the first one_ , and only weeks later, he'd be on the road to the fang-like mountains and never see either of them again.

Reeve stood, a rush of air beside him. “Looks like food's up. You're sure I can't get you anything?”

Two years, and he'd finally learned the answer, if not to stop asking. “No, thank you, it won't be necessary.”

Reeve frowned, staying a moment under the cedars as a rush of wind threw a hail of golden leaves around them. He moved to the tables, joining the throng taking turns with paper plates. Crisp and colourful salads, cuts of meat charred and caramelised and rich with spices, wines sweet and bright made with fruit grown in the village, and their talk over it all. Vincent's mouth watered and he bit his upper lip. His unwanted guests had left him with a keener sense of smell, and no doubt taste too, if he allowed himself to try. If he bit down on the dressed leaves and let them crunch between his teeth. Biting down on bone, shards cracking between fangs – he hissed and sneered, but no-one seemed to notice, too busy with the fruits of Tifa's effort. She stood to the right of the fire with Reeve, swaying on her feet.

“This is incredible, Tifa,” he said, waving a forkful of red and purple salad.

She shrugged. “I do what I can. I'm mostly just messing around. I've never had this many fresh ingredients available to me before -”

“Hey.” Reeve tapped her shoulder gently. “I mean it. You've become so creative with what you make and it's been lovely to watch. I've never had red shelly paired with lime and chilli before, but it's delicious.”

She took a small, mocking bow, but her smile remained. “Quite a compliment from a man who spent so many years eating at the finest restaurants in Midgar.”

“Ugh. Listen. If I never end up in another situation where I'm obligated to act excited about a bite-sized piece of fish served with a smear of foam that looks like something out of Hojo's lab and costs more than most people's rent, it'll be too soon.”

Tifa laughed. “There's definitely none of that here.”

“And don't get me wrong, it tastes good. It's just also kind of stupid,” he said, sipping the wine. “But if I've learned one thing, the price, the ambience, even the food, none of it matters but the company you keep.”

“Hear, hear,” she said, and clinked their glasses together. Then Reeve was swallowed up by a small crowd asking after him, and Vincent turned away. To his left, a girl with long black hair swept over one shoulder sat cross-legged on one of the benches, tuning a guitar in her lap. Satisfied, she slung the strap over her shoulder and struck a single ringing chord into the evening haze. A few around her jumped to attention, smiling as they turned to watch, another girl tapping out a slow and steady rhythm on her bare knees. The girl with the guitar played a few simple chords then picked up the pace, picking out a tumbling melody, measured and wistful. A little boy watching them whistled along to a tune of his own, their sounds rising together into the wind, shifting and changing around each other.

A white-whiskered old man sat beside them and reached one hand into the pocket of his vest, dropped it, and reached up again. He did so twice more before taking out a silver mouth organ, tapping it against his thumb. The percussionist caught the movement and nodded to him, then the others. They made room for him, leaving spaces where chords would go, and with a nervous smile he raised the instrument to his lips and breathed its wavering sound into the song.

Cloud and Tifa took up position behind them, nodding along. Reeve was sat with Elmyra, papers spread out across their laps and Marlene following the trail his finger made. “The wind turns the turbine, and the energy created by the movement goes all the way down here, can you see?” Marlene's eyes grew wide and Reeve smiled again, the one that crinkled the corners of his eyes. Beside them Cid leaned close to whisper something in Shera's ear, stroking her hand and nodding towards Reeve and Elmyra. She shook her head, grimacing and looking at the ground – until Tifa leaned in, directing everyone's attention to the right.

Vincent craned his neck and there were Yuffie and Elena, still sitting together on an oak stump on the fringes of the gathering with a growing collection of glassware by their feet. Yuffie rolled up the sleeve of her hoodie and presented her arm, bent at the elbow. “Go on, then, feel my bicep!”

“That's nothing,” said Elena, slurring only a little and exposing the arm that performed the legendary punch. “Feel _my_ bicep.”

Yuffie moved off and knelt on the ground instead, her arm extended onto the stump. “Come on – _hic –_ then, arm wrestling, you – _hic_ – and me, right now,” she said.

“What is happening?” said Shera, laughing and shaking her head.

“ _That_ ,” said Tifa, arching an eyebrow, “is what we in the know call awkward bruiser tomboy flirting.”

Elmyra smiled as they groaned and grappled in a world of their own. “Should we intervene and stop them mixing their drinks like that?”

Nanaki flicked his tail from side to side where he lay at her feet. “I couldn't say, but I did see some planetology students in the Canyon get themselves into a terrible state doing that.”

“Ah, let 'em make their own mistakes,” said Barret, reclining back against the bench table. “Best way to learn.”

Cid lit another cigarette and smirked. “And to think, you got all that learnin' to look forward to, 'bout ten years from now.”

Barret smiled with a huffing laugh, reaching out to ruffle Marlene's hair. “Bring it on, man, bring it on. Say,” he said, pointing up at the bruise-coloured sky above the clearing, “it's getting' kinda dark. If we're gonna be headin' in soon, then I know I ain't the only one just dyin' to hear your big speech, Cloud.”

The last but one word was embers to dry wood and a chant rose up around the fire, “Speech! Speech! Speech!”. With Tifa rubbing his back Cloud stood and they walked with a shorter, middle-aged woman to the wooden steps up to the centre. The party fell silent, even the birds and the wind in the trees waiting to let them speak.

“Good evening, everyone,” said the stranger, her voice deeper and louder than her small stature suggested and carrying well across the clearing. “As much as we're all enjoying the incredible spread Tifa has worked so hard to give us -” and she paused, to allow for the atonal, beer-fuelled cheer that rose up, “and rightly showing our appreciation, let's all take a moment to reflect on what we, each and everyone, have played a part in accomplishing. Tonight is for all of us, and we open the centre at last to commemorate how far we've come in building something better out of the ashes of the old world. And not only us! It's a joy to look to the work of our allies in Cosmo -”

A roar went up from the benches, all assembled cheering and punching the air and banging their cups against the tables. The speaker's eyebrows raised, then she smiled and cleared her throat.

“A toast, then, to our comrades in Cosmo Canyon and Fort Condor!”

Glasses and fists and another round of cheers went up.

“Free Mideel!”

Clappering and hollering startled the doves from the trees.

“Free Nibelheim!”

At this, Tifa whooped, a wistful smile touching Cloud's face.

“Free Corel!”

Barret was silent, but raised his half-empty beer glass with a deep nod. Cid clasped his shoulder and Elmyra touched his other arm gently, right above the metal hand.

“And hopefully, before the year's out, we can welcome Independent Icicle Inn!”

Amidst the clamour Yuffie stood up, one leg giving way under her and moving her in wobbly pirouettes until she righted herself, straightened her back, and smashed her beer bottle on the ground. “ _Wutai_!” she screamed, as shimmering shards of green lifted about her ankles like a spell.

“Yuffie!” Elmyra hissed. “You better be ready to clean that up!”

But all eyes were back on the steps as the woman ushered Cloud forward, looking at the floor and rubbing the back of his neck. “Thanks for coming, everyone,” he said and lifted his shoulders, smiling again as he gazed upon them all. “And now we all have this place to hang out and get to know each other better, I guess I want to thank you for being here, full stop. For making our home what it is. When I wake up here with the chickens screaming outside our window I feel content and I feel safe, and I didn't know the world could be like this again.”

He looked up with a soft snort of laughter. “It's the funniest thing to look back on. When I first met some of you, all I cared about was a paycheck, or at least that's what I tried to tell myself. And now we're all here for the same reasons. Because we've all lost something. Our homes, our loved ones, our dreams that we built ourselves on...” He pursed his lips together for a moment, sniffed, and raised his eyes again. “And at the core of it, it's the same thing that took them from us that told me I was stronger if I pretended not to care. So I thank you, all of you, every day, for proving me wrong.”

Tifa clasped him by the elbow and stood beside him, greeting the crowd with a sweeping gesture towards the centre. “And it's important that we keep them with us, everyone we lost, to guide us. But tonight is all about the future, and everything we have still to build.”

A round of applause spread through the gathering, and a little boy tugged gently on his mother's arm. “When I grow up, I want to build things like Cloud and Tifa do.”

One man in a flat cap turned to another, speaking more quietly. “Is it bad that I kinda miss the normal world from time to time?”

“Eh, I get you,” said his companion. “I miss having all those channels to choose from. I miss sitting pretty behind a desk and not sweating in the fields, sometimes. Still, least we only gotta do it a few hours a week.”

Tifa continued. “This coming year we'll be looking at building a library, and starting work on dredging the pond for us to swim in. But for now,” and a man in the audience drummed on his knees as she paused, waving her hand in a graceful arc to the open door, “welcome to your new community centre! We've got a bar, we've got games, we've got a jukebox and a piano, and we'll be open all hours to anyone who needs a bed for the night or a person to listen. The downstairs, at least. Upstairs is just for us.”

A few half-hearted snorts began at her words, a few raised eyebrows, a dignified clearing of throats. Nobody made much secret of the fact that Cloud and Tifa's bedroom was, in fact, open at all hours to many of the beautiful men and women who lived close by. But they stood on the steps in similar outfits with their arms linked, smiles turning soft as they looked into each other's eyes, and no sonnet or master's portrait had even shown two people more devoted to one another.

Tifa finished with a wave and jogged up to the circuit breaker box, turned the key, and in a moment the downstairs of the centre flooded with gold and purple light. A final cheer went up and one by one the people of the village left their seats, carrying the remaining food in with them as they filed up the steps. Tifa went in first and a thudding electronic beat rang out from the centre as they went. Vincent picked up two of the salad bowls and fell into step behind Reeve and Elmyra. “Even I haven't seen what they've done with the place yet,” he said. “I just showed Tifa how to set up the wiring.”

Yuffie appeared beside him, pale and shaking and leaning heavily against a put-upon Elena. “What did I tell ya? This is easy!” She lifted her arms, close to launching herself backwards. Elena kept her right, but she gulped heavily and clutched her stomach. “Is the world always this bitter?” was all she managed before she fell on the railing, leaned forward, and vomited a particularly vivid shade of yellow all over the forest floor.

Elmyra sighed, her smile soft. “Looks like the bar's been blessed, then.” She stood beside Yuffie and rubbed circles on her back. “Come on, get it all out, you'll feel a little less lousy in the morning. Which is when you can take it on yourself to clean it up, incidentally.”

Marlene stood in the centre of the main room, whirling in circles and gasping as she stared at the ferns and vines trailing from a frame in the ceiling. The room was panelled in dark wood and dimly lit by lanterns of ever-changing colours, and stepping in as a soaring synth note lifted out of the shadows, even Vincent smiled. The long bar took up most of the back of the room, lined with stools, the greater part of the wooden floor free for dancing. Most of the seats towards the entrance and by the walls were taken as Vincent pushed through the press of people, and with drinks already in hand they sat beneath fragrant flowers and foliage, growing on shelves and in woven baskets.

Vincent tucked himself into the corner at the end of the bar, half in darkness. The grand piano sat opposite him, salvaged from somewhere in the city, its black paint chipping. His mother's piano was never less than gleaming, shining as bright as the high notes she preferred to play in. He polished it for her, once, as a surprise the week of her big exhibition, when she was awake all hours of the night in service of her paintings and burned the dinner twice. Her eyes had grown misty and she'd ruffled his hair like he was still a child with a dragon to pin on the refrigerator, not fourteen and already taller than her. “You always know just what to do,” she'd said, so certain and so wrong.

The others came and went as the night wore on, welcome in his corner for a few how's it going and how are you questions, always retreating back into the light. They danced, they drank, they ate, they made new friends in their new clothes and he sat still. The darkening skies over the forest called to him and to something else, the wild urge to run on all fours through the brush and hunt under the moonlight that followed his footsteps even here, under the leaves with all of them. He turned and damn near snarled at a strange presence appearing by his side.

“Mr. Valentine?” she said in a small voice, one eye hidden behind her hair. The girl with the guitar, leaning heavily on her right leg and struggling to meet his eyes.

“Hello,” he said, as soft as he could. “Can I help you?”

“I don't mean to bother you,” she said, pushing back her hair, “it's just that my family lives in North Corel, my aunt and my uncle, and they're kind of all I have left after what happened to Midgar. And they've had it bad there for such a long time, so I just wanted to say thank you for fighting for them. That's all.”

Vincent inclined his head and allowed her to see him smile. “It's the least I can do.”

“I tried to persuade them to just move here, but you know what people from Corel are like. They'll never budge from that mountain. Still, that's all I wanted to say. I'll let you get back to... whatever you're doing.”

She made her exit with a shy wave, standing near the window until some of the other kids pulled her into the middle of the floor to dance, and she did, whirling and laughing with the weight of all she'd lost off her shoulders for a while. Cloud joined them, nodding his head while sipping a cocktail almost the exact aquamarine of his eyes, a looseness about him that was new. He threw a nod to Vincent as he made his way over to Tifa, taking a moment's rest behind the bar with her eyes on the piano.

“Go on,” said Cloud, stroking her wrist.

She shook her head. “I can't now. Everyone's talking, I'd just be interrupting.”

“Go on,” he said again. “You've spent all this time practising.”

Tifa twisted one foot behind her back, but a wicked grin was pushing at her lips. “I've had too much to drink, I'll just make a bunch of mistakes.”

“You think anyone cares if you get a couple wrong notes? Come on, they'd love to hear you play and you know it.” He slid off his stool and gripped her shoulders over the counter, urging her along to the end. “I know I do.”

“On one condition,” she said, ducking out from under the bar and tossing her hair behind her shoulder. “You have to dance.”

“That's it?” He stretched his arms over his head with a smirk. “Better get to it.”

Tifa lifted the lid of the piano as he made his way back to the dancefloor, and with a final look out over the people she called home, she smiled and took to the stool. She struck a few low notes at first, softly, louder as she climbed the scale. By then the village was on its feet, ready to go, and Cloud held out a hand to Shera after Cid shook his head and turned back to his cigarette. He led her to the centre of the floor as Tifa launched into a lively old jazz standard – the name was on the tip of his tongue, mother had played it too, some nights when friends had visited and gathered in the drawing room for cheese and port, but her playing was slower and more precise. Tifa's fingers flew across the keys and she flicked her hair in time, a smile widening behind it. Barret grooved his way out of the corner seats with Marlene bouncing on his shoulders, their friends jumping and clapping along around them. Yuffie shuffled past with Elena in tow and a bottle of some clear spirit in her hand.

“Since you've made room for it,” said Vincent, arching an eyebrow.

Yuffie stuck out her tongue. “Whatever. I can be blind drunk and still dance better than you if you tried, Vince.”

That much was true. He'd tried before in another time, and each of his partners had laughed, calling him a robot in friendly jest. _You're doing all the moves right, but you're putting no feeling into it_. The same as when he sat at the piano and struck the keys himself, like inputting commands, his fingers hit the right places but he'd never found the soul that enlivened his mother's playing, that drove Tifa now. Into the second verse she tapped one foot along and laughed to herself even as her brow creased with concentration, adding a few trills of her own from the high register to the music.

Towards the back, Reeve had pink lantern light in his eyes as he led Elmyra across the floor. She whirled and swayed in time with him, her skirts fluttering around her, soft and glowing as he caught her by the waist. Marlene tugged on her dress and she let him go to join her hands with Barret and his daughter, the three of them hopping around in a circle. Reeve watched them fondly for a moment, before another man bumped his shoulder and offered his arm, resuming the dance.

_If he's happy_...

Tifa struck a long glassandi that sent shivers up his spine as she hit the final chorus, standing now and hammering the keys. Cloud dipped Shera in the centre of the room to a round of clapping and cheering, and they posed together for the final notes. “Again, play it again!” cried Marlene, but Tifa stood and took a mocking bow, placing herself back behind the bar. One of the kids put a slow rock song on the jukebox, and the night wore on, until the salvers and platters were cleaned of food and more and more villagers had stumbled home with happy goodbyes on their lips.

Long after the moon was up, Tifa yawned and struck a small bell on the wall by the bar. “Okay guys, last orders! I'm flagging over here!”

Cloud collapsed onto the seat next to Vincent, a light sheen of sweat on his skin. “How's it going? I'm sorry, I've hardly had time to talk to you tonight.” He laughed to himself and tipped back his head, closing eyes ringed by dark smudges.

Vincent squinted. “Eyeliner.”

“A little. And mascara.” Cloud opened his eyes again and winked. “Just wanted to feel beautiful, that's all.” He drained his glass and settled back against the bar, laughing it off as if he and Tifa weren't two of the most beautiful people Vincent had ever met. One night after Mideel the three of them had sat together in the bar, a plain room furnished with nothing but lawn chairs and a boombox then, and they'd invited him with husky whispers and caresses to his uncovered arm to their bed for the night. And how sweet it could've been, to share their love for an hour or two, but he'd left for a room of his own. The dark road he walked was cold and empty as it was, without another brief and soon to fade glimmer of remembered light to cast deeper shadows.

A crash came from behind them and Yuffie plummeted towards the floor, her stool giving out where she'd swung back on it. Elena darted out of the way on reflex, only slowed a fraction by the wine, but Nanaki sprang into action, catching her on his back before she hit the ground. He ran with her spreadeagled on his back, and she raised a trembling arm into the air, slow and laboured. “Chariot! Wutai!”

“Yes, quite,” said Nanaki, depositing her on one of the couches in the next room.

Tifa made her way out from behind the bar with a bottle of water and a plastic bucket. “What does it say about us that we made the wolf the designated sober friend?”

Barret barked a laugh. “Hell, we already made him the foremost voice of justice in the free world, what else could go wrong?” He sat on the far side of the room with Marlene dozing against his shoulder, staying at the centre tonight though he lived but a five-minute walk away. Elmyra patted Marlene's head and stood to join Reeve, Cid, and Shera stacking crockery and clearing leftovers.

“Oh, don't worry about that!” Tifa called, halfway into the kitchen. “I'll take care of it in the morning.”

Cloud stretched and leaned back against the bar. “Y'know, talking to too many people really tires me out,” he said, finishing with an exaggerated yawn. He threw a glance to Tifa, who nodded in return – and the stage was set. He turned back to Vincent. “I could use some air. Feel like taking a walk with me?”

Vincent could've laughed at the transparency of it. But the night was crisp and cool and the woods had called to him all the while. They left the building and its amber-coloured lights behind, going again past the houses and over the bridge where only cicadas and splashing trout in the stream kept them company. Side by side under the moon, neither said a word, all the better to breathe in the tranquil night. Aerith had skipped up to them once on the road as the party walked the forests of Gongaga in cloying heat. “Are you two related, by any chance?” she said to Cloud and Vincent guarding the rear, to no reaction. She'd never ask the same thing watching them walk the village Cloud had helped to build from nothing. He held himself with a freedom that wasn't there before, smiled more, relaxed his hunched shoulders and eyed the world with a wonder so many had stripped from them. The truth had set him free. And it was worth the inevitable heart-to-heart attempt that was coming, to share the silence with him for a moment.

“Been a long time since the world was so peaceful,” Vincent said, when the last light of the houses faded out behind them and left only the silver-blue of the moon.

“For now,” said Cloud, quiet as the rustling grass.

Vincent frowned. “You're expecting trouble?”

He shook his head. “Not imminently. But you know it's inevitable at some point. Seawall's still eating up smaller companies that are trying to start, I don't know how closely you follow all of that, but we've got to assume at some point they're going to try to go full Shinra.”

“And you're prepared?”

“We've got some kind of machine gun for everyone who's willing to take up one, and Barret's teaching them how to make bullets. Tifa's training others for close range combat. It's all in that bunker under the centre, and at some point we're thinking of building a tunnel through the mountains into the city in case we ever need that protection, but that's a long way off.” He rubbed his neck and smiled with tipsy ease. “But we've got to dredge that pond before we even think about it.”

They came to the water's edge, moonlight sparkling on the water and a few unseen denizens of the night slipping from the reeds into their burrows with muffled alarm. “I'll be there. If you ever need me, I'll come as fast as I can from any corner of the world.”

“I know.” Cloud took a step back and turned to him, his lovely face silver in the darkness and full of drunken sincerity. “Y'know, Vincent, if you're so concerned about it, we've always got a room for you here. I mean that.”

Vincent held still and let the tumbling waters speak for him.

Cloud sighed and let his shoulders fall. “We're really worried about you.”

“You needn't be,” he said in his gentlest voice. “You know nothing can harm me, not in any real way. I tried enough times.”

Cloud stared at him open-mouthed, only the chirping of the insects breaking their silence. “Go over that sentence again,” he said slowly, “and please tell me which part of it I was meant to find reassuring.”

Vincent sighed. “This is kind of you, Cloud, but there are so many others who need that kindness more.”

“Need, or deserve?” Cloud paced in rough circles a small way back from the stream. “You're my friend. And I wouldn't be a good friend if I let you keep doing what you're doing. You need companionship, community, everybody does.” He stumbled on a loose stone but righted himself quickly. “I'd know.”

Silence fell again. The moon passed behind a shadow and an owl called alone into the night somewhere close by, to no echo or answer.

Cloud resumed his steps, but kept his eyes level with Vincent. “Okay, look at it this way. How about all the work Nanaki's been doing helping people find a better path in life? The Turks. The heads of Shinra. The people who dropped the plate and the ones they took the orders from. And by your logic, what, he should just give up? What's done is done, so his work is pointless?”

“Of course not,” hissed Vincent.

Cloud smiled at him, soft with pain behind it. “I get it, I really do,” he said, almost a whisper. “Even after all this time, sometimes I'll still start a sentence with 'When I was in SOLDIER'. And when we first settled here, all I could think was that someone's missing, and she isn't here because of me.” He drew in a shuddering breath and screwed his eyes shut, grappling a moment for something to anchor him in emptiness. He swallowed, and still his voice cracked. “And I think it, still, every time I see a new flower. But what's that supposed to accomplish?”

Vincent closed his eyes. Aerith had slipped away in the early hours before anyone could stop her, and when he tried to picture her going, she always wore the same grim determination and pained smile as Lucrecia did when she put a hand to her stomach, still flat, and told him. Aerith had the same light brown hair, the same distant look in her eyes sometimes, a light that fixed on something beyond the reach of all around her.

Cloud was looking right at him. “Why do you always think you're the exception?”

Vincent said nothing, and a bitter autumn wind tugged at his hair and the tatters of his cape. Some light seemed to drain from Cloud's eyes as he waited on an answer, on this, what should have been the happiest night of his life, there under the stars with the people he'd grown to love. Vincent should've stayed away, found a quiet place to sleep and left life for the living. He had no business poisoning the village.

“I thought you acted by consensus here. I can't imagine the other villagers taking kindly to me moving in.” He threw his hair back over his shoulder and drew the cape closer about him. “Failed experiment, ticking time bomb, danger to civilization...” He permitted himself a small, huffing laugh. “Vampire.”

Cloud sighed. “That's because you're only listening for the bad stuff. What about 'victim of morally bankrupt human experimentation', 'trump card of the revolution', and 'hero'?”

Vincent turned away from him, the moon full and cold and retreating from the cloud cover. “I already promised to use this body to help you fight for what you've built, here or anywhere. You don't need me for anything more than that.”

Cloud walked out in front of him and seated himself on a gnarled oak root, legs stretched out before him, leaning back to let the moonlight wash over him. “I remember one day, the spring after we first got here,” he said, grinning. “We were still living out of tents and trailers then, setting up the plumbing, learning how to plant and grow our own food. The sun was out all day except for a few minutes where it clouded over and showered, and it was still bright enough that you could see the sun in all the raindrops. And the kids here, most of them spent their whole lives under the plate, they'd never seen anything like it before. They ran outside and danced around in it, this warm rain on their skin, laughing and laughing, they thought it was magic.” He chuckled softly. “We all got a little misty-eyed that day, I can tell you.”

To wake up each morning like anyone else, to smell the cedars in the dawn mist and rise with the song of the birds, greeting all the village good day, a small house in the trees, a hearth, new books, perhaps a table for the others to sit at with him... It came in a flash, real enough to touch, a crueler torment than any horror the creatures he shared a self with flung before his eyes. For Lucrecia would still be cold and alone beneath the earth, and the scars the planet bore from what he allowed to unfold unchanged.

“You've made something more beautiful than I thought the world capable of,” he said at length. “But there's no place in it for me.”

“I'm not trying to give you a tourist pitch here. What I'm trying to say is... When I saw them dance in the rain, and when they were crying beside me, Tifa, Barret, Reeve, Elmyra, just 'cause of how happy they were, well. There's moments like that, and I feel like I can live with myself.”

Vincent cleared his throat. “I came to see you all tonight. I'll be back the next time we all convene. Can that be enough?”

Cloud stood, shaky and with heavy-lidded eyes, but he managed a gentle hand on Vincent's shoulder. “Sure, if you really think it's enough for you.” He dropped the hand and rocked back on his heels, eyes closed. “Well, it's pretty late. Want to walk back with me?”

A few crickets chirped in the grass, and the wind picked up again. “I think I'm going to stay out a while longer,” he said. “So many people drain me, too.”

Cloud nodded. “Alright. See you in the morning, I hope.” He turned and walked away from the reach of the moon's light, on the edge of the undergrowth, and paused. “Vincent?”

“Yes?”

“The moment you're looking for, the one thing you do that lets you forgive yourself... It's not coming. If it wasn't when we stopped Meteor, or when we took Junon, or when you helped anyone else free themselves, what the hell else do you think is going to do it?”

A breeze scattered the candles of the moon over the waving water. It lapped at glistening rocks under the watchful eyes of the old forest that would outlive all of them but one.

“Goodnight, Cloud.”

“Goodnight, man,” said Cloud, and he disappeared almost without a sound into the trees and the dark, muttering to himself quiet enough for no person without enhanced senses to hear. “I tried, I can say I damn well tried.”

Cloud took the quiet with him and left Vincent with the rustlings of the forest, keeping a social order all of its own, hidden from even his keen eyes in the dark. And the stars, greater in number now it seemed than in the days of mako lights, constellated beacons for a weary lone traveller. He paced the banks of the stream and the hidden pathways of the woods until the coloured lanterns drew him back, across the bridge and past the houses where all who lived there slept in peace. Drunk, full, happy – and Cloud most of all. He'd made a ghost of the person who'd prised the lid off the coffin, sharp-edged and scattered in himself – just a kid, really. The strangest thing, strange and cruel, that a man Vincent met well on the road to becoming him should have left him so far behind.

The lights were out as Vincent climbed the steps to the community centre and let himself in, new hinges silent and no-one there to greet him – only high piano notes. Tifa's silhouette sat at the instrument in the dark, a half-empty glass resting on the lid. She struck a playful melody in the upper register, rising and falling as delicate as petals in a summer breeze, undercut with sparse low notes like the beating of a heavy heart. The patterns of her fingers echoed in the empty night. A pause, and she came back with a rolling, skipping line almost to the beat of a carefree giggle he'd heard on the road and never again. She slowed as she descended the scale, down and down, finishing with a small and fading flourish.

She stayed inert as the last note faded away and the silence came back heavier. Vincent put one foot forward onto a creaking floorboard. She started and turned, softening to a smile as she made him out in the gloom. “Hey, Vincent,” she said in a small and tired voice. “I didn't hear you come in.”

He moved towards her as she sipped from her glass, putting it back on the lid and drawing in a shaky breath, face hidden behind the curtain of her hair. She clutched a long strip of red fabric to her chest, falling and pooling in floaty layers across her lap and down to the floor.

“I apologise for intruding,” he said, “but your music was beautiful.”

“Thank you.” She pushed her hair back behind her ear and even as she smiled, her eyes were shining. “I wrote this one myself. I always wanted to make my own music, growing up, but I never had the confidence.” She smoothed the dress in her arms, holding it closer until she choked on a whimper.

She pressed a hand against her chest as if in pain, struggling for breath the way she must have when they strapped her down in a room full of poison for all the world to see. “Are you alright?” he said, a sad and meagre offering to this room so full of life, so short a time ago.

She sobbed again, clucking sounds coming from her throat as she tried to swallow it. “I have,” she said, in a voice close to cracking, “so much to be grateful for. Don't you think?”

The scene was only described to him after the fact, Tifa red in the face and tear-stained and working herself free with all her might. Vincent had been marching across the airstrip as it happened, doing what needed to be done to help Cid secure the Highwind. But Barret and Cait Sith painted a vivid picture, Tifa struggling and panicking in front of the whole planet, and it had stirred something. Something that should've died on the day of a tearful confession and all that came after it.

“I get to share my cooking and my music with everyone, and it makes them happy,” she whispered, folding in on herself. “It's all I ever wanted.” She sniffed and wiped her eyes, her nose, wringing her hands in front of her. “I'm so proud of everyone here. I do conflict resolution but I don't really have to, you know? Nobody gives each other any trouble. They just want to help each other. They don't need me at all.”

The village and everything that grew there, the coloured lights and the music, all of it gone in the blink of an eye if the airship had arrived mere moments too late. She didn't know. How could she, when she came back to them shaken but unbreakable and for all that was raging inside of him, the best he could do was “So glad you're alright, Tifa”?

She was bent forward, keening and pressing the pads of her fingers into her arms, the red dress spilling over the floor. She let loose a shuddering breath with her face obscured again. “I don't even remember the last words I said to her,” she said, voice warped and elongated by her crying. “I don't know if they mattered. I just wish I could've made her hear me, I wish she knew I think about her all the time when we're building all this and that I, I... That she made me want to write music.”

She laughed softly to herself between sobs. “I have a secret,” she whispered. “I never told anyone. But you know, before it happened, I thought when everything calmed down and we had a moment to breathe, I was going to take both of them aside and I'd say, well, we're all adults, we all clearly want to do this, what if all three of us make a go of it? But I waited too long, I always do -”

She was silent, then, bent almost double and heaving. Vincent was frozen. He stockpiled words like bullets, an arsenal he'd amassed and honed since he was tall enough to reach the books on the higher shelves. He learned _penumbra_ and _effervescence_ and _threnody_ and _repine_ and he learned them in two other languages and found no strength in numbers. They stuck in his throat just the same, never assembling themselves in an order that could help anyone.

He hadn't cried since before his long sleep, couldn't, something else that was cut away with no chance to stop it. A new low, surely, to envy her in her heartache.

Tifa sat up and closed the piano, slow and careful. “And now we're all working like crazy, and I'm so happy here, but any time I have a moment and it's quiet it's like this, and... Oh. I have so much to be grateful for.”

Another secret burning a hole in her heart, confessed to him only as he chanced to be there. Vincent cleared his throat and whispered. “You haven't told Cloud any of this?”

She half-scoffed, half-laughed, looking up at him open-mouthed with a trembling lip. “I can't. I can't burden him with this, too.”

She rose to her feet and folded Aerith's dress over her arm, stroking the fabric as its delicate frills bounced and waved. Had Cloud looked so lost when she stood by his side in the lifestream and pulled them out together? “Do you really think he wouldn't be there for you, if you talked to him?”

“I can't...” She shook her head and stood at the edge of the bar, draining her glass. She left it on the side of the counter, drawing one finger in a singing circle around its rim. “I'm tired, and I've had too much to drink. I'll be fine in the morning. There's lots to do, everyone's here, there's nothing to worry about.”

She rolled her neck and took a final glance over her domain, turning on her heel and heading towards the stairs to lie down and try to forget.

“Tifa?”

She stopped in her tracks and turned to him, a focus coming into her eyes like it was the first time she registered his intrusion.

“I knew who the song was for as soon as I walked in,” he said, as softly as his ruined throat would allow. “You're good at this. You can translate an emotion into a sound. All I ever did was touch the keys asked of me.”

She struck still and stared at him, blinked, then crossed the floor again. With a final sob she stumbled and fell against him, wrapping her arms around his neck and pressing him close, even as clasps and buckles sank into her bare stomach with only the dress between them. He tensed a moment, then returned her embrace, and some of her tension fell away as she sank against his chest.

She drew away and leaned up to kiss his cheek. With a smile she wiped away the last of her tears, then reached to stroke a flyaway tuft of hair back from his forehead. “I really wish you weren't leaving tomorrow,” she said. “And I wish you'd do something for yourself, just for once.”

Vincent quirked an eyebrow. “If I did, would you?”

She laughed, hiding her mouth with the back of her hand and swaying on her feet. “You be careful, Vincent, or I might hold you to that some day.” With that she walked away, head held high and hands outstretched for balance, until the fading sounds of her footsteps on the stairs left Vincent alone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you've made it this far, I hope you had a good time with my weird ideas that I came up with while level grinding on the Sunken Gelnika and letting my mind wander. I write for myself and I will be proud of my work on this series no matter what, but I can't lie, it's a little intimidating to just sit down uninvited among people who've been writing these ships and characters for years. I'm not new to FF7 but I am new to such a level of investment in it, so I hope this is alright! And if you did enjoy the story, the setting, or my writing in and of itself, might I interest you in my Elmyra-centric fic that you can access by clicking the link below? While I don't think it's necessary for reding this one, it does give some additional worldbuilding details as well as context for her role in future instalments, and I personally believe it to be some of my best work, too. A new chapter should be on the way soon, and in the meantime, please feel free to share any thoughts you may have.


	2. The Promise

_I wanted to disappear... I couldn't be with anyone... I wanted to die..._

Her voice, once so clear and commanding, then a frightened thing quavering in time with the reflections from the water on the walls of the cave. The tremor of it went with him back into the light and lurked like a shadow on the long road to that morning where she couldn't follow. An echo of his own words, spoken time and again to himself in the moments between nightmares. So cruel a fate that only now, as the hollowed ruins they were, they should finally be together in the same space, on the same level – a terrible, terrible thing that she should have been dragged down to his. Vincent lay on his back on one of the wicker couches in the living room of the centre, half-smothered in red cushions and a knitted blanket. Yuffie snored somewhere behind him. What could she hear now, under the ground? The never-ending drip of water, the cold wind over the mountains, or the very core of the planet sounding its condemnation?

_It seems to me, perhaps_ , he told the others on that morning in the shadow of Fort Condor, under a clear blue sky again at last, _that a person could only know what to do with freedom once it was given to them_. An easy thing to say with the sun rising behind them and people all over the world ready to stand up and fight. So many words – that Hojo should have been the one to sleep, that being with them wasn't so bad – so simple to say in the moment, high on victory, alight with rage, but how soon they dimmed once the fire that sprung them burned down to embers.

A board creaked on the deck below, signs of life in the building awake at last to join the trilling dawn chorus in the trees. The last time they'd all woken up together, first instinct still said to look upward and see Meteor drawing every closer during the night. Once the fires raining down on Midgar subsided and the lifestream turned away, they'd collapsed where they stood on the deck, clinging together so they wouldn't drift away into the great, wild unknown of a world without Shinra. Vincent, sleeping for the first time in decades from exhaustion and not choice, awoke to Tifa and Cait Sith's whispered conversation beside him.

“I can't hear Reeve,” the cat murmured, fragile and empty like it wasn't the first time he'd said it, too breathy for a creature who did not breathe. Tifa rubbed synthetic fur in something like reassurance. A gnawing grew in Vincent's stomach for a man whose face was unknown to him, and their talk came in fraught, frightened sentences until Cid called them into the cockpit, all as the last fires faded from the horizon.

“... leaked documents bearing official Shinra signature reveal decades of unethical human experimentation, a cover-up of horrific events in Nibelheim,” said the announcer over the on-board radio, crackling, kept alive on some generator doomed to die soon, “as well as the most damning evidence yet of prior knowledge regarding the disastrous environmental consequences of mako consumption...”

_We should help him_ , said Yuffie, once they realised only one person with clearance could've been responsible. _It's the honourable thing to do_ , she said, calling it duty as if tears weren't welling in her eyes.

“... in Junon and unavailable for comment, taking refuge in the central command tower guarded by remaining Shinra loyalists from crowds of angry people at the gates...”

The birdsong concert gave way to metal clanging from along the corridor and the smell of bacon rising through the open window. Vincent sat up and crushed the heel of his hand into his eyes. Sleep was unnecessary, but he'd stared at the beams on the ceiling until the pale dawn crept over the tree line, and closed his eyes to while away the time. He left Yuffie to delay her pain and sickness a little longer and made his way out through the door and along the corridor. The kitchen nestled behind the bar, a small room dimly lit through small windows, but alive with sizzling food and laughter. Cid caught Vincent out of the corner of his eye and waved, a skillet of spitting bacon before him.

“Morning, Vince!”

“Morning!” Shera chirped, chopping pears and apples on the table in the centre of the room.

Vincent ducked into the kitchen, passing Elena putting her shoulder to the wheel mixing pancake batter. She nodded hello to him and passed the bowl to Barret, commandeering the second stove. “Getta load of this, everyone,” he declared and grabbed the skillet by the handle, executing an elegant backwards flip of the half-finished pancake back into the pan.

“Always the showman, aren't ya?” said Cid, though Shera gave a little round of applause.

Nanaki raised his head where he lay curled on the floor with Marlene scratching his ears. “When I've seen pancakes made, the maple syrup goes into the batter itself -”

“How many times do I gotta tell ya?” said Barret. “When you got the thumbs to get up here and cook 'em yourself, then _and only then_ am I gonna take your word for it.”

“We figured we'd get right on and do this as a treat for Tifa after she wrung herself out so hard for us yesterday,” said Shera, quiet as ever. “It was Cid's idea.”

Cid shuffled the contents of the pan onto a plate lined with paper and lit himself another cigarette. “Gonna be 'bout ten minutes if you wanna join us.”

The bacon gleamed with salty promise, crisped to perfection, and delicious when followed with autumn fruits to cut through its richness. “No, thank you, I'm fine,” said Vincent, mouth watering. “The others...?”

“Tifa and Cloud are still in bed, and the state of her last night, I'm guessin' Yuffie is out for the count, too,” said Barret. “If all you're gonna do is take up space in here, you got Elmyra and Reeve out on the deck puttin' the world to rights.”

Vincent gave thanks and left them, bowed and hunched as he emerged into the morning. Elmyra and Reeve sat side by side under an awning of flowered vines, on high seats with printed documents and a tea set spread across the table in front of them, all before the sun had made it over the tree line. Reeve had changed into a new shirt, crisply ironed black, that strained against his slumped shoulders. He sat with all that tension just the way he had in Mideel and if Vincent had two hands unmarked by the creatures under his skin, he'd massage it right out of him. The first letter had arrived at the centre some ten days after they left the island to rebuild, put in Vincent's hands a month later. He read it by the light of the amber-coloured lamps lining the street outside his hotel in Kalm, and willed his heart not to race.

“ _I write this with half a mind to keep looking over my shoulder, now I don't have you to watch my back_ ,” it read, in looping cursive as elegant and refined as would be expected. “ _But all jokes aside, I wanted to thank you for volunteering yourself, and for the advice you gave me. I tried what you suggested and gave myself a moment's quiet every day. And I found some of the clarity you spoke of, and the design for the dam I was struggling with is finished now I've given it time to breathe. But for now, while I readjust to being back home, I also feel the empty space where you were._ ”

He should've crumpled the letter and the beautiful handwriting and thought no more of it. It would've been easy if not for the two weeks watching Reeve at his desk from his lair in the windowsill framed with jasmine, the way his hair would fall across his eyes as he leant the full weight of his attention and expertise to what was on the paper. The heat of that gaze followed him all the way across the sea, the same focus perhaps that he'd put into writing those words. In truth, the same empty space had opened up unbidden next to Vincent the first morning he watched the sun come up without a stolen glance at Reeve and the way he closed his eyes before the day's first coffee, the grateful deep inhale he took. Silence sat heavy without the melancholy music he liked, acoustic guitar and soft low strings played quiet while Vincent read in the corner. And the running outfit, the accursed form-fitting running outfit he put on every day to take to the paths through the jungle with Vincent a short way behind.

“ _I've always been the type of insufferable person who'll start whistling or humming or yapping about anything just to fill the silence, and you've helped me to learn to really listen. That said, since you enjoyed all my lifestream-proof architecture rants so much, here's what we're working on next..._ ” Undercut with jokes, like Vincent hadn't noticed the way Reeve lit up when he said he wasn't boring him, like it wasn't his very duty to notice the smallest detail.

“ _I know you don't like the phone,_ ” the letter said, “ _and in truth, neither do I. I find it can be very intrusive, and I have trouble working out what someone's really saying when I can't see their face. So I thought perhaps writing to you would be a better way of keeping in touch, which is something I'd very much like, if you're so inclined_.” And it was so thoughtful that Vincent couldn't bring himself to throw it away, even though he should have, even though tucking it into a pocket and keeping it there still with the others could never amount to anything good. And two nights later he found himself at the writing desk in his room, telling Reeve in his own jagged scrawl about the childhood sunburn he acquired in Rocket Town, of all places, where he'd just been helping Cid and Shera make the move to the Canyon with minimal interruption. The words arranged themselves more easily on paper, without a socially acceptable countdown on how long it took to respond.

Reeve turned his head at the creak of the wood behind and smiled. “Vincent! Care to join us?”

Elmyra offered him a smaller smile as he approached the seat Reeve pulled for him, gesturing to the teacups. “Would you like some?”

He shook his head and sat, a tentative gloved hand unfurling one of the blueprints, sketchy and vague still. “Back at work so soon?”

Reeve smiled. “We're both pretty bad for getting a great idea in the middle of the night and not wanting to wait around and forget it.” They exchanged a fond and familiar look, and Reeve pulled over the larger sheet they'd been working on. “This is a bit self-indulgent, really, but we thought it would help everyone keep focused if we finalised a vision for the city. As final as you can be on this scale, anyway.”

“It's beautiful,” Vincent murmured, tracing a finger over the very different Junon resplendent on the paper. A view from the sea showed the city under blue skies all draped in green, its bullet-grey concrete armour only a place to hold gardens and hang crops to feed the city and clear the air. The ornate glass panels that provided them power and were already springing up around the heights coated every building, and in the place where a mighty cannon once stood was an oak tree no less spectacular. Vincent lingered there a moment, following the whorls on its bark, rendered with care.

“I do look forward to the day we can get rid of that thing,” said Elmyra.

“The cannon is about the only factor dissuading certain factions from launching a counter-revolution,” said Vincent. The Weapon-killer had died with Midgar but a smaller model took its place, a grim and silent shadow watching the sea for anyone that threatened the way of life they had built.

“I'm aware,” she said, quieter and more clipped. “But I can hope for a day when it's no longer necessary.”

A day far from this one it should come to be – and yet the central command tower was unrecognisable in its floral finery only two years after Vincent first set foot therein, on a mission. On the grey and rain-sodden day of the revolution he leapt into the middle of the foyer with a finger on the trigger in a star shower of broken glass, glinting red as blood in the flashing lights above him. Klaxons blared a steady rhythm against the chaos of gunfire and screams from outside. _We'll see you in the new world_ – Tifa's voice, carried with him after she threw the iron chain asunder and ran with Cloud and Barret to head the charge through the city gates.

They left him stood on the plains in the weak sun that struggled as best it could to shine through the dark clouds. He'd already done what he left the coffin to do, put the final bullet in what became of Hojo himself and then walked over his corpse to do the same for the creature he called a son that bore her face. It was over. He could leave, find a tomb of moss and lichen under the ground and remain, never to emerge and let anyone down again.

But Reeve was waiting. Watching the fight, perhaps. Did they keep him somewhere comfortable? Did he know they were coming, that they cared? Or was he screaming himself bloody for someone, anyone, to put an end to it any way they could? Vincent narrowed his eyes on the tall tower and stepped forward.

Quite the welcoming committee they sent. Shinra's best and brightest, charging forward without hesitation, strobing red gleaming on the front of their helmets. Vincent ducked under the first volley of gunfire, fast enough that they paused, but they didn't stop. He piled the bodies by the door, no time to check how alive they were.

Elmyra stirred her tea, slice of lemon and one cube of sugar, the spoon clinking on the glass cup. She took a sip, pausing her work for a moment, and let her eyes follow the flowered vines up and over the trellis above them. She worked in that tall tower every day, and most likely, she'd never imagined the sweeping staircase red with blood and emergency lights.

That day footsteps and barked orders carried down from above, shadows descending, and Vincent's heart sank for them. What kind of idiot had them running downstairs at a disadvantage instead of waiting for him on the higher floors? But one bullet caught him in the shoulder during the skirmish in the foyer. Little more than a graze, but shameful, so early in the fight. Too early for mistakes. He dived forward, landing a bullet in the neck of one soldier and rolling up in the face of another, throwing him down the stairs. One motion after another, faceless numbers in his way. Twisting an arm until the man dropped his gun, a kick to the stomach knocking him down. Catching another by the shoulder so the shot meant for Vincent landed instead in the thigh of his comrade. A blow to the neck and in swarmed more from outside. No time for anything but the strongest fire spell he had, thrown downstairs, and he turned away from the smell to take another floor.

Onward. Third, fourth, fifth floor. One platoon after another, gunshots ringing off the walls and chipping the paintwork, the wooden surrounds, breaking anything but the shadow they aimed for. Machine guns in hand, green orbs sparkling at their wrists, they'd been sent with full armour but not the most important tool – any idea what they were up against. He left them hanging over banisters and slumped against the walls and plummeting to join the ash on the ground floor, a crimson trail to the top of the tower and the world they made afterwards. On the twenty-fifth floor they sent the stronger task force, the better armour, halfway up. Vincent flipped backwards onto the railing on the way to the next level and a burn in his thigh almost sent him falling down to join the dead. He gave a shot in answer and landed, crouched, a line of fire shooting up and down his leg with every step upward.

Cloud had questions when he'd pitched the plan, gathered together at the table in Fort Condor above the map. _Are you sure? You're kind of attention-grabbing_. The tower rose over the city walls, where the last remnants of Shinra looked down upon the mob at their gates and where they could only hope a man whose face Vincent had never seen was still alive. _And I can't be stopped_ , he'd said, drawing the gun from its holster and hooking it around his finger with a practiced twirl, fitting like a part of himself in his gloved hand, _I'm great at this, I'm fucking great at this_. The red fabric billowed about him as he moved. Halfway up the tower he rained down more fire, all of them falling boneless and thoughtless to the floor, their hopes and loves gone with a flick of his wrist.

Reeve. Reeve was waiting. Sitting in the village at the table beside him, the morning sun in his thick dark hair, Vincent could've laughed. As he charged the tower, he conjured a picture of what this man who'd watched them from a prison of an office might look like – of middling age, no doubt, if he'd risen so high, thin and pale from too much time spent behind a desk, poor posture, grey, plain, no-one who'd catch the eye if you stripped him of his tailored suit. Another bullet took his shoulder as he advanced on the thirty-fifth floor. They made a circle around him and the gauntlet caught most of their fire, then clenched the neck of the last man after Vincent kicked off his helmet. A sweep of blonde hair, hazel eyes, and a frightened throat that strangled his words. He dropped his rifle and ran for the doors.

Fortieth floor. Sweepers and bots out in force this time, all put away with a comet spell. He stepped over the rubble and charred wiring as the roaring in the streets below swelled in pitch. It swelled still in his heart, even as Elmyra wrapped a vine around her finger at their table and explained how the crops would nourish one another. A soldier with a bigger gun stood manning a control panel, lifting his chin and shaking but a little as Vincent walked towards him, slow and measured. He took aim then fell back against the wall – he'd seen the carnage on the way up, and there was nowhere to run. _Tuesti_ , Vincent growled with a cold metal hand on his neck, his pulse pounding through the leather glove as long talons strayed perilously close to the points that kept his heart beating.

_No clearance for the top floor_ , he whimpered in a voice close to breaking, _even if I did, we do not negotiate with terrorists_. Vincent ached for him then. The same lines another man in another life had swallowed in his initiation, repeated in prayer as the shadow loomed over him. He slammed the man against the console and he cried out and turned to him with those wide watering eyes. The same eyes they all had, no matter their strength or standing, when they knew the end was nigh.

Vincent wrenched the gun from him and threw him across the floor, narrowing his eyes, _run_. He did, stumbling and leaning too far forward, into the streets and the many paths they opened that day.

Reeve was on the top floor. All he needed to know.

He broke a window with the arm encased in metal and ran out onto the fire escape, zig-zagging up the remainder of the building as the Highwind crested the city walls. His cloak billowed behind him like a flag, a banner for victory, and he threw a salute to Cid and Yuffie waiting on the deck to join the fray. Crossing the airstrip, deserted, he kicked down a metal door and went inside. One guard went down with a chop to the neck and the next with a precise blow to the upper thigh. _You're practically a grandpa to us_ , Talya told him when they were introduced, two years his junior and a Turk already for three more. He was twenty-two already and would never be the fastest or the strongest, they said with painful irony and no knowledge of what lay ahead, so they trained him to be precise. A predator, a hunter with an eagle eye for the blind spots in armour.

His path cleared, Vincent rushed through the corridors with the barest outline of the building, the route Barret and Tifa had taken to join them on the Highwind the first time. There came the occasional interruption to be thrown to the side or impeded with a bullet. A wordless voice rose within him, louder at every agonised step – it thirsted for blood, and he could stop the pain by giving in, letting it take over. And there was no way to avert it, he'd lost too much blood, but he could hold on as long as it took to find Reeve.

Reeve laughed when he told him of his journey through the tower some time later, in Mideel morning air heady with dew and jasmine. Of how he'd taken one look at the digital lock beside the door, run out of patience, and shoved the clawed gauntlet into the console. “Is that why you came in with your hair all stood on end?” Reeve laughed, and so did Vincent, the first time he let Reeve hear it.

The door opened and he called for Director Tuesti in a voice louder than the explosions on the ground, the dust and sparks of warfare rising up to the windows, and then he called him by his name.

A scuffle behind him, the scrape of furniture on the tile floor, a spluttering cough and then that voice. The voice that spoke in his dreams where he couldn't stop it, that spoke to him at the table of flowers growing out of concrete.

“Vincent?”

A voice clear and deep and hushed with reverence, so much younger than the one in his mind, but there was no time to find its source. He turned and blocked the bullet with metal, and in the same motion brought his claws down upon the face of the man with the gun. And so it was with blood dripping from his hand and pooling on the floor around him that he turned to meet deep brown eyes for the first time.

“That's the room you pulled me out of,” said Reeve, tracing over another sheet of plans with one finger as the others crashed away in the kitchen. He wore a new ring, a thin band of glass with dried blue asters frozen inside. _He's beautiful_. There was no other word for him, even as Vincent found him for rescue, one eye bruised and swollen, a spray of the soldier's blood on his cheek and his shirt, stained and torn but of a deep ocean blue that suited him perfectly. High cheekbones and not a grey hair in sight.

In an instant his arms were around Vincent, pulling him into broad shoulders and sandalwood, frozen as Reeve pressed him close. Reeve drew back then, he was sorry, he couldn't believe they were here, and he stopped to wipe the blood from his face with a tattered sleeve – where were the others, he wanted to know, as Vincent led him at a quick step through the corridors, what was all the noise about, did the leaked documents make it into the right hands, did people know?

Vincent allowed a pause before the wide window in the command room. _You could say that_.

Fifty floors below them, the streets rose and fell with an ocean of bodies. Swarms of people clad in all colours, moving as two, the anger of the oppressed baring its teeth on the weak and fearful who'd watched them from the tower and bled them dry. The spectral forms of their summons weaved in and out of the fray between flashes of gunfire and the rainbow glow of materia at work. Fire, ice, lighting, and all the world holding its breath.

_Who's in charge here_?

_Whoever's left, I think_. Vincent moved to the door and half-turned back to face him. _We need to get moving_.

“These awnings here, we're trying to outfit the whole city and most of our allies with them within two years, so no-one has to run air conditioning anymore,” said Reeve at the table on the deck, pouring himself another glass cup of jasper-coloured tea. His quiet authority was something to behold, blooming with his time out of the shadow of Shinra and the length and breadth of his vision for the future and the society that would support it. And Elmyra was there at his side to share a vision of her own, over tea Vincent didn't need to drink.

Behind them, the decking creaked again. Tifa and Cloud stepped out from inside in sunglasses, hair mussed and party clothes changed for looser, flowing cotton. “Good morning, guys,” Cloud said, wincing a little.

“Hey,” said Reeve, his work behind him with a smile. “How are you two feeling?”

Cloud grumbled and shook his heavy head while a brighter Tifa rubbed his back. “One glass of water for every drink of something stronger and another before bed, and you'll be right as rain,” she said, and bent to fill a silver watering can from the faucet.

“We got woken up to bacon, though, so it's not all bad - oh, wow,” said Cloud, leaning back against their table and drifting his eyes over the designs. “I used to think Junon was the ugliest city I'd ever seen. I can't believe we might get to walk around this some day.”

Reeve smiled, still, but with a downward look as he shook his head. “I'm afraid this one's not for us,” he said, rolling up the painting of the glimmering city cloaked in nature's wonders while Tifa watered battered boxes of herbs in the background. “It's for Marlene's grandchildren, perhaps, if we work very hard. Though... by then I would hope they're capable of building something better and more beautiful than I could imagine.”

They cleared away the tea things and Tifa finished her rounds and in they went for food. Vincent stayed by the table, the scattered papers and drawings, the far future put aside for breakfast. He reached out for one, and stopped, cold shivers down his spine. He'd see it again, come to life as he remained, with the vision of the city the only part of his companions left alive.

They came back out into the sun with bowls of chopped and seasoned fruit, plates piled high with bacon and eggs and Barret's pancakes, browned to perfection. All arranged themselves around the table and helped themselves to tea and coffee and fresh juice in tall pitchers, save one, lounging on the floor with a plate of his own. Vincent took the seat beside Barret that Marlene had vacated, more concerned with prodding at Nanaki and rubbing a balloon over his sides until his fur stood on end. They fell quiet as they tucked into their food, and Vincent was still as a stone. In the hazy calm of the morning with all of them occupied, he had nothing to contribute. He'd contributed nothing since Fort Condor.

They landed in the empty space left by the egg the morning after the world was supposed to end, filing in to join their allies one by one, Vincent last after Barret's sorrowful look back towards the rising sun where it rose, too, over Kalm and his daughter alone for another day, another week, however long it took to gather their forces. Midgar's angry and shellshocked refugees, the fighters of Cosmo Canyon, the people of Nibelheim only then learning they'd been flung from their homes to make room for paid actors propping up a lie. They came in what old and battered crafts they had from all over the world, prowling the fort like hounds at the slip, teeth all but bared.

Vincent took charge at that candlelit table on which was spread a map of Junon, rising to his feet with their expectant eyes on him; he would draw fire helping Reeve escape from the tower, while a vanguard broke down the gates and kept eyes away from the underwater reactor, where the greatest number of their troops would file in quietly over a course of days. Tifa and Cloud would lead the charge disguised in the uniforms they'd taken from Shinra deserters who presented themselves at the doors of the fort begging amnesty, and Cid would arrive later with an airstrike and, if she held true, Yuffie commandeering the greatest warriors of Wutai, hungry for revenge for more than a decade. He stood at the head of that table pointing to unmarked locations on the map, one idea leading to another, approval all round, _I'm great at this, I've always been great at this_.

The glass door of the centre slid to the side, a groan emerging from it. Summoned by food, Yuffie appeared in the doorway on unsteady legs, plastic bucket in hand as she pressed the other to her forehead, wincing in the sun.

Tifa tilted her head and smiled. “How are we feeling today?”

Yuffie cackled. “Get a load of me!” she said, standing as straight as she could and placing the bucket on her head. “Seven different kinds of alcohol and I only threw up once!”

Vincent laughed, and she missed his soft gaze as she took a seat and slumped forward with her head pressed into her elbows. She met this queasy dawn the way she met the illusions and effects of the strange dimension they'd been drawn into at the base of the Northern Cave, steadfast, sneering, grinning. Lifting her chin as the shapes and colours of a strange solar system formed around them, blazing fury hurtling through it all towards them, slow and deliberate to prolong their wait as Sephiroth loomed over them. The face he had loved, her long nose and sharp cheekbones radiant amongst the feathers, and yet not her face at all. Her eyes were hazel-coloured and warm, even when darkened with exhaustion, and Sephiroth looked down upon them with a stare as lifeless and cold as the jade whose colour it brought to mind.

A normal morning of no consequence it had been until she told him, at another table of eggs and coffee. “I'm carrying the experiment myself,” Lucrecia said as she mixed in her sugar, as offhand as if she was commenting on the weather, a possessive hand on her stomach, still flat. She smiled with the clustered cells already eating her away inside, the same contaminant that kept her something like alive, angelic and frozen, in that cave. Dressed in white, eyes closed, unlined and unmarked and unnatural. But she was more beautiful in the mornings, long hair unbrushed in its binding and goggle marks around her eyes, contorting her beauty with loud yawns after forgoing sleep for her passion. That ever-clumsy grip on her equipment, the high-pitched huff she let out when she dropped something, her gasp when an answer clicked into place – all gone now, only a placid screen of nothingness forgotten under the ground.

And what had been her son, laughing as they cowered. Closer and closer came the spell, the heat of it blistering on bare skin, all while the cursed burning rock hurled itself through space outside to break the planet into pieces. He could have put down the gun and fallen to his knees before the creature born of his failures. Meteor would have taken him, too. The only chance, once and never again, to escape the eternity of ghosts and emptiness that awaited him on the other side of the battle.

But Yuffie scrambled to her feet after the supernova hit, laughing and spitting blood, wiping her mouth and readying her blade. _Was that supposed to hurt_? She charged, and he ran at her heels. Across the table from him, she groaned and poured coffee with trembling hands. No-one had believed her until she showed up during the battle for Junon, rappelling from the deck of the Highwind down tall buildings with her countrymen beside her. _Cid didn't radio to tell us anything was stolen, so she must be holding to her word_ , said Tifa, breathless with possibility and only a hope. But there she was, loyal and hungry to the last.

“You should try to eat something, Yuffie,” said Elmyra in her softest voice. “The alcohol lowers your blood sugar, see, and you'll feel better if you get a piece of fruit or something down you.”

Yuffie gurgled acquiescence and raised her head from her arms, reaching out and holding aloft a ripe green pear with dread in her eyes. Elmyra smiled in a forlorn way, then laughed as she looked behind her to see Nanaki with fur standing to attention and Marlene grinning beside him. Barret shook his head and whipped a camera out of his pocket, immortalising the son of Seto in his static majesty.

“No Elena?” said Cloud.

“She had a mishap with the coffee she was carrying so I gave her a shirt of mine to change into.” Tifa cleaned her plate of the last bite of eggs and stretched with her arms behind her head, glancing around all assembled. “Can you believe the last time we were all together was _two years ago_? We need to do this more often.”

“Agreed,” said Cid, lighting up and leaning back. “Gotta get the schedules lined up better.”

Yes, two years. Two years since Cid pressed a reddened hand to his chest, tears springing to his eyes at Nanaki's offer of the observatory. _You want_ me _to take care of that beautiful machine_? Nanaki nudged his head against Cid's thigh. _I can think of no-one I trust more to watch over this child planet in my grandfather's place_. And he returned to them a man at some kind of peace with himself, looking up into the skies he loved so much with a toothy grin. “You notice how the second we all get back together, it starts feelin' just like old times?”

“Old times minus the imminent destruction part,” said Barret. “Minus the corporate greed, minus the rampagin' giant monsters...”

Tifa shivered in the warm air. “I still get all jittery thinking of how _huge_ they were. I never thought I'd see myself being glad of the Sister Ray.” She took a sip from her half-empty teacup, then bolted upright, startled by something in the doorway. “Oh, you shouldn't do that! Don't you know you'll stain the carpet?”

Behind her Yuffie crouched over a rug a short way into the living room, clutching her ribs. “I'll be _fine_ ,” she spat out, and rolled her eyes. But she returned to her seat when Elena emerged, hair neatly brushed back behind her ears and Tifa's blue shirt hanging loose from her shoulders.

“Thanks for letting me stay, you guys,” she said, hovering by the table.

“You're welcome,” said Cloud, “and thank _you_ for helping us put it all together yesterday.”

Tifa smiled. “How's your head?”

“I'm okay, thanks,” said Elena. “I had a glass of water after every drink, like you said.”

“Ugh.” Yuffie returned to her seat, slumped against Elmyra and sipping orange juice. “Who plans ahead for getting drunk?”

“You sure make one hell of a case for improvisation, Yuffie,” said Shera, twirling a slice of bacon on her fork. “Gotta hand it to you, I swear I never saw some of them colours you puked.”

Barret sighed. “Is it really too much to ask for a man to be able to finish a nutritious breakfast without that kinda talk?”

Shera's face fell and she hunched in on herself. “Sorry,” she muttered, cutting the last of her eggs in silence.

“Elena, you're a class act, why don't you come have a seat with us?” said Barret, patting the empty space on his other side. As she sat, did she think of Barret standing over her with his gun arm locked and loaded while she wept on her knees, protesting her innocence as he announced to the world the butchers of Sector Seven? And Reno beside her, hands tied behind his back and struggling to his feet on a wounded knee, teeth bared, _c'mon, man, just untie me, we told you we were done with Shinra, at least put a rod in my hands and let me fight back,_ he spat, bloody at the mouth, sliding back to the floor of the podium and making no attempt to move again. _Not like this, not on my knees_.

It was Reeve's long-fingered hand that pulled Vincent from the pile of bodies he came to in, Chaos depleted and shouts of victory drifting with the smoke on the air. He leaned against Reeve as they walked through the rubble and confusion, weak and aching after his body was wrenched from him again, and a smaller presence in the ornate regalia of Wutai's army appeared at his right and took the other arm. _Told you I'd save the day for you, didn't I? And not a word of gratitude from anyof you_.

He hobbled between them with a searing burn across his shoulders where wings had been, tripping on severed limbs and ground slick with blood. _On the Shinra side, their summon materia stopped working outta the blue_ , Yuffie whispered as they went. _It only worked for us. The gods have heard us, they're on our side, they must be_...

The others held court on a high podium in the central plaza surrounded by a crowd of singed and soot-stained people, shouting as one. Tifa, Cloud, Cid, and Nanaki stood to the back, bleeding and stooped but alive with blades and fists and teeth bared. Barret took the lead and paced, slow and deliberate, in front of the captives. _This is your confession?_ He paused in front of Scarlet and Heidegger, bandaged and handcuffed. _Deafenin' goddamn silence?_

What remained of Rufus Shinra scowled as best he could with a face burned beyond recognition, as torn and ragged as the red banners stripped from the towers and thrown to the ground. Rude looked out on the angry crowd through the shattered lens of his sunglasses in silence while Reno struggled to keep his eyes dry beside him, and Elena threw herself to the ground, sobbing openly. The assembly roared.

_Their summons wouldn't work! The gods we forgot have spoken!_

_We end Shinra here!_

_No more mako, no more lies!_

Barret continued, louder than the town combined. _Kidnap, torture, assassination, human experimentation, misinformation towards incitin' war, the premeditated mass murder of Sector Seven, not to mention knowingly drainin' the lifeblood of the planet for the sake of profit, anythin' I'm forgettin' in those leaked documents_?

The crowd swelled again at that. _Get Tuesti up there too, he was with them, he knew_ , and the man at Vincent's side shrank into himself with no argument.

The noise of the throng swelled to an inferno, and Tifa touched her small and shaking hand to Barret's flesh and blood arm. Reno scrabbled to his feet, protested but for a moment before the injured knee gave way again.

Elena cried out close to choking as Barret stepped in front of her.

He touched a hand to the gun.

_Mom!_

He dropped the weapon to the ground, standing so much smaller without it.

_There'll be no more killin' here today, and besides, a quick death's too good for the likes of you_. It was then he turned to Nanaki while Tifa fell on her knees to hold the crying girl, and there a promise was made. Nanaki prowled to the front and spoke, as calm as could be, wind whispering in tall grass. Restoration, not retribution. A person shaped by the world to live without regard for community and reciprocity must understand the error of their ways. _Gotcha_ , said Barret, raising his voice again.

_And we ain't like you. Y'all get good food, soft beds, a chance to learn codin' or construction or bread-makin' or basket-weavin', any thing your shrivelled little hearts desire, but you're gonna do it while takin' a damn long, damn hard look at yourselves_.

_Changed my mind, just give me the goddamn bullet_ , Reno muttered, grimacing as Barret outlined the dismantling of the reactors, the cleansing of areas still drenched in mako, the meetings with their victims. Elena jabbed him in the side with an elbow, laughing as she cried.

Cid took a step forward with a lungful of cigarette. _Cheer up, guy_ , he said, leaning in to Rufus and blowing a stream of smoke into the remnants of his face. _You're still a young man, you got plenty of time to learn new skills_. Rufus turned up his blackened nose and flinched, whipping his head to the side as Cid cackled. A tension lifted then, as all and everyone seemed to realise the day was won, and no more death was necessary. And something grew in Vincent's chest, sparks from a fire they kindled together that day in the light autumn rain, burning in him and in all the hearts around him, one and the same.

Tifa took centre stage then and threw out her arms to all the world – no more killing, the time had come for talking, for everyone to have their voices heard at last. Marshaling the crowd the way she sent them all back to the kitchen to clean up. Dishes were scraped, washed, dried, and handed to her, filed away according to her system. She oversaw the work with a strut that belied her outburst at the piano. Her tears, her pain, wiped away and hidden under a mask she applied like a lipstick. _Say something_ , a voice from somewhere deeper than his demons lay urged, but Vincent shook his head there in the middle of the kitchen, his hands on a dish towel and everyone talking around him. His words had never done anything but make a dire situation worse.

Reeve was at the sink, scraping the last remnants of the evening's feast into a metal bin to take out for compost, and passing a few scraps to Nanaki. “It might not be how I'd have cooked it, if I had thumbs,” he said, “but it's not bad at all.”

“So glad to hear it. I can go to my grave happy now,” said Barret, reaching down to fondle his torn ear. Two years since they were last clustered together this way on a rooftop in Junon, Barret pacing back and forth and jamming all the buttons on his PHS until the Highwind broke the horizon again, bringing Marlene to him. They talked for hours, and down below, the people of the city were already working as one hauling tables into the streets and emptying Junon's larders, laughter and the early signs of revelry making their way up to where Vincent stood in the shadow of the command centre. _What have we done, what have we done_ , said Tifa again and again, pacing back and forth until Cloud sat her down and tended her wounds.

They drank and danced together while Vincent watched and they went their separate ways three days later, with tearful professions of gratitude and love and promises to keep in touch. Cid departed for Cosmo Canyon and his new task tending to the observatory with a smile wide as his skies and a gentle calloused hand for Shera. Yuffie boarded with them to be dropped off in her beloved homeland, all the prouder for her time learning what lay elsewhere. Nanaki left with the remnants of Shinra to find their absolution or something close to it in Midgar. Elena passed a burnt edge of bacon down to him as she carried dry dishes to the cupboard. She'd followed them to the rooftop, still shaking from the bloodlust of the crowd, and then to the village, drying dishes in a place she'd played a part in building, looking no less lost than she had that night two years before.

And Vincent left, too, before the citywide celebration of the new world had finished. He patrolled the perimeter a while, unseen by anyone. He came when they called, when someone somewhere needed him to strike fear into the heart of their oppressor, and sometimes he made his way to the cave with news of the surface, a tantalising glimpse of the beauty and hope that waited beyond the crystal.

When the others climbed down from the podium and found Vincent and his companions in the crowd, Reeve had smiled and extended a hand for Tifa to shake. She slapped it away and threw her arms around him instead, embracing him in a way Vincent couldn't as they made for the heights to meet Marlene off the ship. And among the heights Reeve had stared from the air strip down to the city whose transformation must have already been taking place in his mind. _Do you want me cleaning up in Midgar, too_?

Nanaki sauntered towards him and nuzzled his hand. Reeve started backward, blinking as he saw the creature speak in person for the first time. _I would judge you well on your way to atonement already, my friend_.

_Refuse to believe a guy as smart as you ain't got a few tricks up his sleeve for powerin' this place without mako_ , said Barret, eyes on the horizon. _'Sides, got a little fond of you on the road, some time when I wasn't lookin'_.

Marlene had no mind for strategising or politics, cross-legged on that rooftop and giggling as she smoothed Cait Sith's fur, entranced by the jerky imitations of a cat the robot made. Reeve knelt too, promising she could keep him, if she wanted, and if Cait wished to go. _He better not have one single camera, microphone, dictaphone left on him, hell, I don't even wanna see a paper cup and a piece of string comin' out of that thing in my house_ , said her father, but any objection was lost when Marlene stared up at him with huge eyes.

Reeve swore to dismantle the camera himself, then his head fell, another apology and another promise. Barret reached out his hand and pulled him back to his feet, sparing a smile. _You wanna know how we're doin'? Come over for dinner some time_.

In Tifa's kitchen they stood again, Reeve's shoulder clasped by the metal hand he'd made for Barret, laughing together as Yuffie groaned on the countertop. For a moment the sun caught Reeve in just the right way and sent all his shadows away, lending him the serene cast he took when Cloud first asked if he'd be alright without his cat creation, after all they'd endured together. _Yes_ , said Reeve, eyes on the stars. _I don't think I need him anymore_.

He ruffled Marlene's hair on their way to the living room. “How's Cait keeping these days, then?”

“He's good,” she chirruped, then laughed. “I didn't bring him with me 'cause he said he wanted to stay and keep Bunny company. But he likes it here, 'cause my friends are his friends now, and being in the country is good for the circuits, he said.”

“That sounds wonderful,” said Reeve, patting her head as they entered. “You're doing such a good job.” Vincent stopped in the doorway. Elena and Shera were setting up the pool table at the far end as everyone else arranged themselves on the plush seats, Yuffie with her head in a cushion and groaning at the sound of the setup on the table. It was easy, truly too easy to get used to being around them again, and a pain like something physical wrenched his empty gut. _Then stay_ , came the smallest and deepest voice again.

“It's time I took my leave,” he said. “But I'm grateful to you all for inviting me.”

Cloud turned to him, deflated where he sat with an arm around Tifa's shoulders. “You ever think we wouldn't?”

“Got somewhere better to be?” said Barret. “Forests to haunt, abandoned tombs to go linger in?”

Vincent let them hear his laugh, like a parting gift. “Something like that.”

Reeve was on his feet in a flash, then he stopped still, fiddling with the cuffs of his sleeves. “I'll walk out with you. I wanted to fetch something from the car, anyway.”

Tifa touched his elbow on her way to open the sliding door, looking wistful. “Always a pleasure,” said Elmyra, and he nodded to each of them in turn, Yuffie offering nothing more than a low-pitched whine from behind the cushion. They left the building into brighter sunshine, cold and crisp with the haze of the waking forest blown away. Reeve strode past him and opened the dented door of the car, picking up a blanketed package from the back seat and closing it again. He patted the roof of the vehicle with a fond smile - a rare sight on the roads around the new Junon since the tram line was finished.

“I'm in a state of constant surprise that this thing is still holding together,” said Vincent.

“She's a trooper,” said Reeve, with a final glance over the vehicle that saved Elmyra and Marlene from Diamond Weapon. “But I made Tifa some gadgets for the bar, for a housewarming present. I fixed up a lighting rig that'll change colour in time to whatever's playing on the jukebox, glasses that light up when full, and somewhere in here there's an evaporator so she can make cocktails with any kind of flavour she wants.”

Vincent nodded. “She'll appreciate that.”

“I hope so. It's the least she deserves for all the work she's done.”

Dead leaves stirred about their feet, drifting across the ground so many feet had walked the night before. The path led away from them, into the trees and back through the fields to wherever he would place himself next – Kalm, perhaps, the town on the plains that had never changed, not after thirty years of sleep or the near-end of the world.

“I hope I see you again soon,” said Reeve quietly. “You might not think so, but I miss our talks.”

“You're the one who does most of the talking,” he said. “I only interpose.”

Reeve shrugged. “Quality over quantity.” He reached out and gripped Vincent gently by the right arm.

_You're hurt_. Reeve kept a tighter hold on Vincent when they dashed along the tower's corridor with the world exploding outside. Vincent gritted his teeth at the burn in his right leg. _They'll heal in a couple of hours, you've seen this before, you should keep low_. Not a moment too soon as a shot hit the wall behind them, Reeve flinching and covering his ears as he crouched close to the floor. He swallowed a scream below the sill as Vincent put the rifle to his shoulder, found the gunman in the window across the street, dealt with it, again and again until the barrel emptied and it was time to move.

He should have moved. Instead he was rooted in the tall window, his shoulders on fire and a rising scrape like black talons in his stomach. Too much adrenaline in his system and blood left on the ground to hold off any longer. Chaos was rising. _You don't want to see this_.

_You should give that gun to me, if you don't need it anymore_ , Reeve said, trembling head to toe.

Vincent forced the bile down his throat long enough to hold his eye. _You flinched every time I pulled the trigger. You'd be a danger to yourself and others_.

Reeve nodded when he told him to head for the ground floor, for the entrance to the reactor where evacuation was underway, and he pressed a hand to Vincent's shoulder, a firmer grip, then and then again on the morning in the village, his hand and his eyes lingering a moment too long as Vincent pulled away and moved along the dirt path.

Vincent clutched the window onto Junon as Reeve retreated, his back tearing apart and the first cracks along his jawline giving way to a gaping fanged maw. In his last moments as himself, a world without Shinra bloomed before his eyes, new and free and terrifying. They were going to win. A man with a splintering nail bat and a lifetime of oppression behind him had knocked down an armoured infantryman on the street as he made his way into the tower. They were going to win. They would call a victory while he was still disappeared inside his demon, he wouldn't be there to see a new sun rise with them, to stand by their side as their journey finished in truth – but he had always been most useful as something other than himself, after all. He let go of the ledge as the black clouds behind his eyes overtook him, falling past windows full of screaming faces, and remembered no more.

“Vincent?”

Reeve was leaning against the doorframe by the entrance to the bar, one hand on the handle.

“Yes?”

“I... I just wondered if there was an address I should write to, or if you're good to pick it up here, that's all.”

“Oh.” He shook himself. “No, leaving them here will be fine.”

“Okay, I'll do that,” said Reeve, nodding absently. “Those forests and tombs just won't wait, I take it?”

Vincent placed a hand on the pistol at his hip, with him through the night. “I'm thinking more of the people who won't wait when it comes to destroying what you've built. It wouldn't do to grow too comfortable so soon.”

“Not that you're wrong but... You know you don't always have to be a gun for hire, don't you?” Reeve gripped the doorframe, tensed and ready to retreat. “And not only because we don't pay you.”

“I never asked you to,” said Vincent, eyes on the shadowed trail leading away from the village. “I promised to do my part, and this is the best I have to contribute.”

“That's _bullshit_!” Vincent flinched. He turned back to Reeve, who so rarely cursed or raised his voice, shaking his head with imploring eyes. “Vincent, I've watched you lift iron girders by yourself like they were garden canes. I was in the room with you while you read poetry in three languages. You _speak_ like poetry when someone asks you a simple yes or no question. There's so many things you could do!”

Inside the building, Elena pumped her fist and waved her cue in the air. “Strike!” she said, while the others talked amongst themselves like any other group of friends on any other lazy, hungover morning. They didn't need him there to blight it.

“You've all been incredibly kind, but you have to understand,” he said at length. “I watched as someone I cared for destroyed herself, bore all her pain alone. A person can't live with themselves in any kind of peace after that.”

“Yes.” Reeve exhaled slowly. “I can only imagine.” He slid the glass door open and threw a final nod to Vincent. “Good luck with your travels, and wherever the road takes you. I'll see you around, Vince.”

He left the village the way he came, on an infinite road to a place darker than the cosmos that waited for him when everything familiar crumbled into the sea. _We can't both have it_ , Reeve had said as he sat down beside Vincent on the rooftop after everyone else had walked away to join the celebration on the streets, the lights and laughter. _This spot, I mean, to brood on_.

Reeve thanked him for his rescue and Vincent should've stopped him there, but Reeve was close enough that he felt him shiver in the cold wind that came in from the sea. Reeve thanked him again and apologised. _There was information about your condition in those files... no time to sort them before the leak... And for grabbing you back there with no warning, I should've known better, I thought I'd die in there... Hadn't seen a friendly face since Elmyra left for Kalm, and she hated me_...

Vincent said nothing. He'd had no plans to rejoin the living, anyway, so let people know, let them talk. His body was a dead thing animated by rage and pain and creatures that should've stayed buried. Anyone could cling to it if they wished, though they'd find nothing but sharp angles on his clothes and tales of the depths a creature still called human could sink to written on his skin beneath. Reeve's eyes stayed on him, strayed to the hand clad in gold, _hope you don't mind me asking, but what's it made of that it can deflect bullets? This... gauntlet_?

_Gauntlet, yes_ , Vincent said, holding the hand out to the keen and curious gaze, _I can take it off_ , but he wouldn't.

Reeve touched the tips of his fingers lightly to the plate on the back of the hand, his eyes wide and his voice husky. _We could use something like this, I'd love to take a closer look at it some time. Say..._ And he trailed his fingers over Vincent's palm, covered only in leather, ghosted up to his knuckles and stopped before he reached the metal claws, a pattern that still burned his hidden skin on the loneliest nights. _How about, when we're done examining it, I take you for dinner, or at least a drink? Let it be my way of making it up to you for saving me today_.

Vincent snatched the hand away and stood with the wind picking up his hair and his cloak as he turned his back to Reeve, facing the endless ink washing over the sea. _I don't need to eat_.

For a moment, only the waves gave answer, lapping against the city walls below. Then a quiet, flat voice came from behind him. _Point taken_.

_I have nothing to offer you here. No words of comfort, or congratulations._

The wind came again, colder as the night drew onward. The sounds of freedom rose up from the city, drums, trumpets, clinking glasses and a multitude of voices singing as one. _I don't want to be comforted_ , said the broken little voice. _I don't want to dance and drink like none of this was my doing_. Vincent chanced a look over his shoulder, and Reeve fell forward with his head in his hands. _Gods, I've been such a fool. To think I could help anyone hidden away in a tall tower... I was so ready to condemn Barret and the others for what they did, but what option did we leave them, me and the rest in that boardroom? Violence is the only language they speak. I should've seen it sooner_.

Reeve trembled and took a deep breath, letting it out with new composure. _I just want to stay here and be quiet for a while. You can stay and be quiet with me, if you like. I don't expect you to make it all go away. But I can tell you don't want to join the party either_.

So Vincent sat, the two of them wordless under the stars. The pale light of the crescent moon softened Reeve's profile as he watched the heavens in silence, the long straight nose, the dark lashes, the slight swell of his lower lip. Even bruised and scuffed and some few days unshaven, it was easy to see how he'd risen so high. Not just through his technical prowess but his presence in the wider world, too. The kind of clean-cut handsome that would put worried citizens immediately at ease, and that Vincent would've trailed after in a daze for months if they'd met in better times. The armoured hand he'd touched weighed heavier at his side than before, and words came unheralded and without a search.

_You don't change the system. The system changes you. But after today, I'm a little more hopeful that we can change back. All thanks to you and the others_.

Reeve's eyes widened then and his smile came back, and he asked Vincent of his plans for the immediate future. There was no answer then and no answer as he wandered the woods, only the silent void he lived in. On he went, one step and then another taking him further from them.

A heavy foot splashed in a puddle by his side and her arm went around his waist, her face pale and touched with green, but still bearing her usual smirk. “Didn't think I'd let you go without a proper goodbye, did you?”

“So glad you're feeling better now, Yuffie.”

“I'm not, particularly, but like that's gonna stop me.” She kept step beside him until they reached the perimeter of the fields, her arm locked around him. “They're talking about doing this again next year, but you better come and see me before then, you hear? The door's always open in Wutai if you don't wanna hug trees with the rest of 'em.”

She looked up at him with big eyes and a hope whose mask was slipping, and the least he could do was smile and promise. “I'll keep that in mind.”

She squeezed her arms tighter around him, then backed away. “Well, I better get back now, 'cause the Turk's gonna win at pool if I don't and I won't have that. I'll catch ya later, Vince!” She stepped off with a mocking salute and jogged into the woods, the trees swallowing her back into the embrace of the group and their efforts.

To sleep until the world had need of him, that was the plan, and he walked and walked over the fields and then the plains. The phone he was given so long ago stayed in his pocket, taunting him with weak-minded promises. How easy, how frighteningly, maddeningly easy it was to be around them again, and how wider the space around him was for their absence. He crossed the plains to the foot of the Mythril Mountains, through the nights and the rain, and he came to the little town of thatched roofs and cobbled streets where he'd been sent on his first mission. Simple reconnaissance, keeping a careful eye on a bricklayer's union that had a few choice words to say about the rapidly growing use of mako energy, keeping quiet with eyes open. Nothing more than he was used to, growing up behind a book, watching townsfolk over the top of it with the red eyes they shivered away from.

The short woman behind the counter at the inn signed him into his room with a shudder, and handed him the keys with a trembling hand, flinching from the mere brush of her fingers against his. He sat cross-legged on the bed as the room grew dark, phone on the table beside him. He could've smashed it against the wall, thrown it from the window to lie in pieces on the cobbles and tempt him no more. The nightmares would return that night, as they always did after a parting. In the dream he was back in the coffin, scrabbling for the lock, scraping his nails against the wood itself as the air grew thin, emerging at last only to find another, bigger tomb enclosing him.

At the peak of Fort Condor on that morning of the first clear sky after Meteor, the air and all beneath it was limitless. They looked to the horizon and the city they planned to storm, the rising sun bathing them all in a fiery red and striking the spark that led them into battle again. _The principles we live by in Cosmo Canyon can apply elsewhere... Now the people know the truth, perhaps they can see they have had what it takes to govern themselves all along_.

_Giving power to the people_ , said Tifa, wide-eyed, _sounds too good to be true_.

_Sounds good_ , said Yuffie, picking her teeth where she sat spreadeagled on a boulder, _but what if you lose_?

Cloud turned to her with the burning sunrise in his blue eyes. _What if we don't_?

_Never gonna get a better time for it_ , said Cid in his cloud of fragrant smoke. _Forces depleted, all holed up in one place, people gettin'_ real _mad..._.

Yuffie scoffed again. _You really think people are just gonna get up and, I dunno, clean a sewer, all out of the goodness of their hearts_?

_Why the hell not? I'll do it. I'll clean a goddamn sewer every day for as long as I live if it means Marlene don't gotta do this all over again in twenty years_.

It was then Vincent took his place beside Cloud, standing for a moment in the same light. _For thirty years I lay in a prison of my own choosing, with the intent to narrow the world to only those walls_ , he said, close to breathless from the surging in his heart and the sun warm on his skin, warmer than he ever dared believe it could be again. _And so it seems to me, perhaps, that a person could only know what to do with freedom once it was given to them_.

_Yeah_ , said Cid, sparking up again. _What he said_.

Yes. That was why some will beside his own had drawn him to the little town, and bade him answer the invitation to the village after all. To find his freedom and join their future he must reckon with his past, visit the site of every mistake he'd made instead of waiting on a call telling him where to go, what to do. Restoration, as Nanaki said. _And then_... The same sun that set on the Northern Crater and rose over Free Junon still made its way across the open sky, day by day. The same fire that burned in their chests left glowing embers, in the village, and in him. Cloud was right, perhaps, and a moment could never absolve a sin – but chasing them, living spark to spark, could it be enough to keep the madness at bay? Not enough to stay, but to visit once in a while, and find his shadows no darker for the time spent in the light.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you've made it this far, I think that's very awesome of you. Now, I'm sure I'm not the only one who played the game and wanted to see the gang rescue Princess Reeve from the corporate dungeon, and I've often wondered if that scenario was something else that was intended to be there but ended up scrapped due to time constraints, so I made it happen here instead. I also think leaking the evidence of all of Shinra's atrocities is a perfect cap on his arc, if I do say so myself. Get on my fucking level, Square. I also wanted to share [this short poem](https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/new-feet-within-my-garden-go/), which I think about a lot with regards to this cast and their efforts rebuilding a world all but maybe two of them will never live to see. Thanks a lot for reading, and as ever, I would love to know any thoughts you may have.


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